No Arabic abstract
Deep learning techniques for point cloud data have demonstrated great potentials in solving classical problems in 3D computer vision such as 3D object classification and segmentation. Several recent 3D object classification methods have reported state-of-the-art performance on CAD model datasets such as ModelNet40 with high accuracy (~92%). Despite such impressive results, in this paper, we argue that object classification is still a challenging task when objects are framed with real-world settings. To prove this, we introduce ScanObjectNN, a new real-world point cloud object dataset based on scanned indoor scene data. From our comprehensive benchmark, we show that our dataset poses great challenges to existing point cloud classification techniques as objects from real-world scans are often cluttered with background and/or are partial due to occlusions. We identify three key open problems for point cloud object classification, and propose new point cloud classification neural networks that achieve state-of-the-art performance on classifying objects with cluttered background. Our dataset and code are publicly available in our project page https://hkust-vgd.github.io/scanobjectnn/.
Processing point cloud data is an important component of many real-world systems. As such, a wide variety of point-based approaches have been proposed, reporting steady benchmark improvements over time. We study the key ingredients of this progress and uncover two critical results. First, we find that auxiliary factors like different evaluation schemes, data augmentation strategies, and loss functions, which are independent of the model architecture, make a large difference in performance. The differences are large enough that they obscure the effect of architecture. When these factors are controlled for, PointNet++, a relatively older network, performs competitively with recent methods. Second, a very simple projection-based method, which we refer to as SimpleView, performs surprisingly well. It achieves on par or better results than sophisticated state-of-the-art methods on ModelNet40 while being half the size of PointNet++. It also outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ScanObjectNN, a real-world point cloud benchmark, and demonstrates better cross-dataset generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/SimpleView.
Deep object recognition models have been very successful over benchmark datasets such as ImageNet. How accurate and robust are they to distribution shifts arising from natural and synthetic variations in datasets? Prior research on this problem has primarily focused on ImageNet variations (e.g., ImageNetV2, ImageNet-A). To avoid potential inherited biases in these studies, we take a different approach. Specifically, we reanalyze the ObjectNet dataset recently proposed by Barbu et al. containing objects in daily life situations. They showed a dramatic performance drop of the state of the art object recognition models on this dataset. Due to the importance and implications of their results regarding the generalization ability of deep models, we take a second look at their analysis. We find that applying deep models to the isolated objects, rather than the entire scene as is done in the original paper, results in around 20-30% performance improvement. Relative to the numbers reported in Barbu et al., around 10-15% of the performance loss is recovered, without any test time data augmentation. Despite this gain, however, we conclude that deep models still suffer drastically on the ObjectNet dataset. We also investigate the robustness of models against synthetic image perturbations such as geometric transformations (e.g., scale, rotation, translation), natural image distortions (e.g., impulse noise, blur) as well as adversarial attacks (e.g., FGSM and PGD-5). Our results indicate that limiting the object area as much as possible (i.e., from the entire image to the bounding box to the segmentation mask) leads to consistent improvement in accuracy and robustness.
Most of the existing learning-based single image superresolution (SISR) methods are trained and evaluated on simulated datasets, where the low-resolution (LR) images are generated by applying a simple and uniform degradation (i.e., bicubic downsampling) to their high-resolution (HR) counterparts. However, the degradations in real-world LR images are far more complicated. As a consequence, the SISR models trained on simulated data become less effective when applied to practical scenarios. In this paper, we build a real-world super-resolution (RealSR) dataset where paired LR-HR images on the same scene are captured by adjusting the focal length of a digital camera. An image registration algorithm is developed to progressively align the image pairs at different resolutions. Considering that the degradation kernels are naturally non-uniform in our dataset, we present a Laplacian pyramid based kernel prediction network (LP-KPN), which efficiently learns per-pixel kernels to recover the HR image. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that SISR models trained on our RealSR dataset deliver better visual quality with sharper edges and finer textures on real-world scenes than those trained on simulated datasets. Though our RealSR dataset is built by using only two cameras (Canon 5D3 and Nikon D810), the trained model generalizes well to other camera devices such as Sony a7II and mobile phones.
Perhaps surprisingly sewerage infrastructure is one of the most costly infrastructures in modern society. Sewer pipes are manually inspected to determine whether the pipes are defective. However, this process is limited by the number of qualified inspectors and the time it takes to inspect a pipe. Automatization of this process is therefore of high interest. So far, the success of computer vision approaches for sewer defect classification has been limited when compared to the success in other fields mainly due to the lack of public datasets. To this end, in this work we present a large novel and publicly available multi-label classification dataset for image-based sewer defect classification called Sewer-ML. The Sewer-ML dataset consists of 1.3 million images annotated by professional sewer inspectors from three different utility companies across nine years. Together with the dataset, we also present a benchmark algorithm and a novel metric for assessing performance. The benchmark algorithm is a result of evaluating 12 state-of-the-art algorithms, six from the sewer defect classification domain and six from the multi-label classification domain, and combining the best performing algorithms. The novel metric is a class-importance weighted F2 score, $text{F}2_{text{CIW}}$, reflecting the economic impact of each class, used together with the normal pipe F1 score, $text{F}1_{text{Normal}}$. The benchmark algorithm achieves an $text{F}2_{text{CIW}}$ score of 55.11% and $text{F}1_{text{Normal}}$ score of 90.94%, leaving ample room for improvement on the Sewer-ML dataset. The code, models, and dataset are available at the project page https://vap.aau.dk/sewer-ml/
High dynamic range (HDR) video reconstruction from sequences captured with alternating exposures is a very challenging problem. Existing methods often align low dynamic range (LDR) input sequence in the image space using optical flow, and then merge the aligned images to produce HDR output. However, accurate alignment and fusion in the image space are difficult due to the missing details in the over-exposed regions and noise in the under-exposed regions, resulting in unpleasing ghosting artifacts. To enable more accurate alignment and HDR fusion, we introduce a coarse-to-fine deep learning framework for HDR video reconstruction. Firstly, we perform coarse alignment and pixel blending in the image space to estimate the coarse HDR video. Secondly, we conduct more sophisticated alignment and temporal fusion in the feature space of the coarse HDR video to produce better reconstruction. Considering the fact that there is no publicly available dataset for quantitative and comprehensive evaluation of HDR video reconstruction methods, we collect such a benchmark dataset, which contains $97$ sequences of static scenes and 184 testing pairs of dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Our dataset, code and model will be made publicly available.