No Arabic abstract
We present a new method for efficient high-quality image segmentation of objects and scenes. By analogizing classical computer graphics methods for efficient rendering with over- and undersampling challenges faced in pixel labeling tasks, we develop a unique perspective of image segmentation as a rendering problem. From this vantage, we present the PointRend (Point-based Rendering) neural network module: a module that performs point-based segmentation predictions at adaptively selected locations based on an iterative subdivision algorithm. PointRend can be flexibly applied to both instance and semantic segmentation tasks by building on top of existing state-of-the-art models. While many concrete implementations of the general idea are possible, we show that a simple design already achieves excellent results. Qualitatively, PointRend outputs crisp object boundaries in regions that are over-smoothed by previous methods. Quantitatively, PointRend yields significant gains on COCO and Cityscapes, for both instance and semantic segmentation. PointRends efficiency enables output resolutions that are otherwise impractical in terms of memory or computation compared to existing approaches. Code has been made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2/tree/master/projects/PointRend.
Ultrasound (US) image segmentation embraced its significant improvement in deep learning era. However, the lack of sharp boundaries in US images still remains an inherent challenge for segmentation. Previous methods often resort to global context, multi-scale cues or auxiliary guidance to estimate the boundaries. It is hard for these methods to approach pixel-level learning for fine-grained boundary generating. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective framework to improve boundary estimation in US images. Our work has three highlights. First, we propose to formulate the boundary estimation as a rendering task, which can recognize ambiguous points (pixels/voxels) and calibrate the boundary prediction via enriched feature representation learning. Second, we introduce point-wise contrastive learning to enhance the similarity of points from the same class and contrastively decrease the similarity of points from different classes. Boundary ambiguities are therefore further addressed. Third, both rendering and contrastive learning tasks contribute to consistent improvement while reducing network parameters. As a proof-of-concept, we performed validation experiments on a challenging dataset of 86 ovarian US volumes. Results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and has the potential to be used in clinical practice.
We propose a novel method for fine-grained high-quality image segmentation of both objects and scenes. Inspired by dilation and erosion from morphological image processing techniques, we treat the pixel level segmentation problems as squeezing object boundary. From this perspective, we propose textbf{Boundary Squeeze} module: a novel and efficient module that squeezes the object boundary from both inner and outer directions which leads to precise mask representation. To generate such squeezed representation, we propose a new bidirectionally flow-based warping process and design specific loss signals to supervise the learning process. Boundary Squeeze Module can be easily applied to both instance and semantic segmentation tasks as a plug-and-play module by building on top of existing models. We show that our simple yet effective design can lead to high qualitative results on several different datasets and we also provide several different metrics on boundary to prove the effectiveness over previous work. Moreover, the proposed module is light-weighted and thus has potential for practical usage. Our method yields large gains on COCO, Cityscapes, for both instance and semantic segmentation and outperforms previous state-of-the-art PointRend in both accuracy and speed under the same setting. Code and model will be available.
Image hazing aims to render a hazy image from a given clean one, which could be applied to a variety of practical applications such as gaming, filming, photographic filtering, and image dehazing. To generate plausible haze, we study two less-touched but challenging problems in hazy image rendering, namely, i) how to estimate the transmission map from a single image without auxiliary information, and ii) how to adaptively learn the airlight from exemplars, i.e., unpaired real hazy images. To this end, we propose a neural rendering method for image hazing, dubbed as HazeGEN. To be specific, HazeGEN is a knowledge-driven neural network which estimates the transmission map by leveraging a new prior, i.e., there exists the structure similarity (e.g., contour and luminance) between the transmission map and the input clean image. To adaptively learn the airlight, we build a neural module based on another new prior, i.e., the rendered hazy image and the exemplar are similar in the airlight distribution. To the best of our knowledge, this could be the first attempt to deeply rendering hazy images in an unsupervised fashion. Comparing with existing haze generation methods, HazeGEN renders the hazy images in an unsupervised, learnable, and controllable manner, thus avoiding the labor-intensive efforts in paired data collection and the domain-shift issue in haze generation. Extensive experiments show the promising performance of our method comparing with some baselines in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons. The code will be released on GitHub after acceptance.
We present a method that synthesizes novel views of complex scenes by interpolating a sparse set of nearby views. The core of our method is a network architecture that includes a multilayer perceptron and a ray transformer that estimates radiance and volume density at continuous 5D locations (3D spatial locations and 2D viewing directions), drawing appearance information on the fly from multiple source views. By drawing on source views at render time, our method hearkens back to classic work on image-based rendering (IBR), and allows us to render high-resolution imagery. Unlike neural scene representation work that optimizes per-scene functions for rendering, we learn a generic view interpolation function that generalizes to novel scenes. We render images using classic volume rendering, which is fully differentiable and allows us to train using only multi-view posed images as supervision. Experiments show that our method outperforms recent novel view synthesis methods that also seek to generalize to novel scenes. Further, if fine-tuned on each scene, our method is competitive with state-of-the-art single-scene neural rendering methods. Project page: https://ibrnet.github.io/
Differentiable rendering has paved the way to training neural networks to perform inverse graphics tasks such as predicting 3D geometry from monocular photographs. To train high performing models, most of the current approaches rely on multi-view imagery which are not readily available in practice. Recent Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that synthesize images, in contrast, seem to acquire 3D knowledge implicitly during training: object viewpoints can be manipulated by simply manipulating the latent codes. However, these latent codes often lack further physical interpretation and thus GANs cannot easily be inverted to perform explicit 3D reasoning. In this paper, we aim to extract and disentangle 3D knowledge learned by generative models by utilizing differentiable renderers. Key to our approach is to exploit GANs as a multi-view data generator to train an inverse graphics network using an off-the-shelf differentiable renderer, and the trained inverse graphics network as a teacher to disentangle the GANs latent code into interpretable 3D properties. The entire architecture is trained iteratively using cycle consistency losses. We show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art inverse graphics networks trained on existing datasets, both quantitatively and via user studies. We further showcase the disentangled GAN as a controllable 3D neural renderer, complementing traditional graphics renderers.