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SubscribeDeep Dual-resolution Networks for Real-time and Accurate Semantic Segmentation of Road Scenes
Semantic segmentation is a key technology for autonomous vehicles to understand the surrounding scenes. The appealing performances of contemporary models usually come at the expense of heavy computations and lengthy inference time, which is intolerable for self-driving. Using light-weight architectures (encoder-decoder or two-pathway) or reasoning on low-resolution images, recent methods realize very fast scene parsing, even running at more than 100 FPS on a single 1080Ti GPU. However, there is still a significant gap in performance between these real-time methods and the models based on dilation backbones. To tackle this problem, we proposed a family of efficient backbones specially designed for real-time semantic segmentation. The proposed deep dual-resolution networks (DDRNets) are composed of two deep branches between which multiple bilateral fusions are performed. Additionally, we design a new contextual information extractor named Deep Aggregation Pyramid Pooling Module (DAPPM) to enlarge effective receptive fields and fuse multi-scale context based on low-resolution feature maps. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art trade-off between accuracy and speed on both Cityscapes and CamVid dataset. In particular, on a single 2080Ti GPU, DDRNet-23-slim yields 77.4% mIoU at 102 FPS on Cityscapes test set and 74.7% mIoU at 230 FPS on CamVid test set. With widely used test augmentation, our method is superior to most state-of-the-art models and requires much less computation. Codes and trained models are available online.
FeatSharp: Your Vision Model Features, Sharper
The feature maps of vision encoders are fundamental to myriad modern AI tasks, ranging from core perception algorithms (e.g. semantic segmentation, object detection, depth perception, etc.) to modern multimodal understanding in vision-language models (VLMs). Currently, in computer vision, the frontier of general purpose vision backbones is Vision Transformers (ViT), typically trained using contrastive loss (e.g. CLIP). A key problem with most off-the-shelf ViTs, particularly CLIP, is that these models are inflexibly low resolution. Most run at 224 times 224px, while the "high-resolution" versions are around 378-448px, but still inflexible. We introduce a novel method to coherently and cheaply upsample the feature maps of low-resolution vision encoders while picking up on fine-grained details that would otherwise be lost due to resolution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on core perception tasks as well as within agglomerative model training using RADIO as a way of providing richer targets for distillation. Code available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FeatSharp .
More complex encoder is not all you need
U-Net and its variants have been widely used in medical image segmentation. However, most current U-Net variants confine their improvement strategies to building more complex encoder, while leaving the decoder unchanged or adopting a simple symmetric structure. These approaches overlook the true functionality of the decoder: receiving low-resolution feature maps from the encoder and restoring feature map resolution and lost information through upsampling. As a result, the decoder, especially its upsampling component, plays a crucial role in enhancing segmentation outcomes. However, in 3D medical image segmentation, the commonly used transposed convolution can result in visual artifacts. This issue stems from the absence of direct relationship between adjacent pixels in the output feature map. Furthermore, plain encoder has already possessed sufficient feature extraction capability because downsampling operation leads to the gradual expansion of the receptive field, but the loss of information during downsampling process is unignorable. To address the gap in relevant research, we extend our focus beyond the encoder and introduce neU-Net (i.e., not complex encoder U-Net), which incorporates a novel Sub-pixel Convolution for upsampling to construct a powerful decoder. Additionally, we introduce multi-scale wavelet inputs module on the encoder side to provide additional information. Our model design achieves excellent results, surpassing other state-of-the-art methods on both the Synapse and ACDC datasets.
Clockwork Diffusion: Efficient Generation With Model-Step Distillation
This work aims to improve the efficiency of text-to-image diffusion models. While diffusion models use computationally expensive UNet-based denoising operations in every generation step, we identify that not all operations are equally relevant for the final output quality. In particular, we observe that UNet layers operating on high-res feature maps are relatively sensitive to small perturbations. In contrast, low-res feature maps influence the semantic layout of the final image and can often be perturbed with no noticeable change in the output. Based on this observation, we propose Clockwork Diffusion, a method that periodically reuses computation from preceding denoising steps to approximate low-res feature maps at one or more subsequent steps. For multiple baselines, and for both text-to-image generation and image editing, we demonstrate that Clockwork leads to comparable or improved perceptual scores with drastically reduced computational complexity. As an example, for Stable Diffusion v1.5 with 8 DPM++ steps we save 32% of FLOPs with negligible FID and CLIP change.
Detail Preserving Depth Estimation from a Single Image Using Attention Guided Networks
Convolutional Neural Networks have demonstrated superior performance on single image depth estimation in recent years. These works usually use stacked spatial pooling or strided convolution to get high-level information which are common practices in classification task. However, depth estimation is a dense prediction problem and low-resolution feature maps usually generate blurred depth map which is undesirable in application. In order to produce high quality depth map, say clean and accurate, we propose a network consists of a Dense Feature Extractor (DFE) and a Depth Map Generator (DMG). The DFE combines ResNet and dilated convolutions. It extracts multi-scale information from input image while keeping the feature maps dense. As for DMG, we use attention mechanism to fuse multi-scale features produced in DFE. Our Network is trained end-to-end and does not need any post-processing. Hence, it runs fast and can predict depth map in about 15 fps. Experiment results show that our method is competitive with the state-of-the-art in quantitative evaluation, but can preserve better structural details of the scene depth.
Human Pose Estimation on Privacy-Preserving Low-Resolution Depth Images
Human pose estimation (HPE) is a key building block for developing AI-based context-aware systems inside the operating room (OR). The 24/7 use of images coming from cameras mounted on the OR ceiling can however raise concerns for privacy, even in the case of depth images captured by RGB-D sensors. Being able to solely use low-resolution privacy-preserving images would address these concerns and help scale up the computer-assisted approaches that rely on such data to a larger number of ORs. In this paper, we introduce the problem of HPE on low-resolution depth images and propose an end-to-end solution that integrates a multi-scale super-resolution network with a 2D human pose estimation network. By exploiting intermediate feature-maps generated at different super-resolution, our approach achieves body pose results on low-resolution images (of size 64x48) that are on par with those of an approach trained and tested on full resolution images (of size 640x480).
Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions
Although using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as backbones achieves great successes in computer vision, this work investigates a simple backbone network useful for many dense prediction tasks without convolutions. Unlike the recently-proposed Transformer model (e.g., ViT) that is specially designed for image classification, we propose Pyramid Vision Transformer~(PVT), which overcomes the difficulties of porting Transformer to various dense prediction tasks. PVT has several merits compared to prior arts. (1) Different from ViT that typically has low-resolution outputs and high computational and memory cost, PVT can be not only trained on dense partitions of the image to achieve high output resolution, which is important for dense predictions but also using a progressive shrinking pyramid to reduce computations of large feature maps. (2) PVT inherits the advantages from both CNN and Transformer, making it a unified backbone in various vision tasks without convolutions by simply replacing CNN backbones. (3) We validate PVT by conducting extensive experiments, showing that it boosts the performance of many downstream tasks, e.g., object detection, semantic, and instance segmentation. For example, with a comparable number of parameters, RetinaNet+PVT achieves 40.4 AP on the COCO dataset, surpassing RetinNet+ResNet50 (36.3 AP) by 4.1 absolute AP. We hope PVT could serve as an alternative and useful backbone for pixel-level predictions and facilitate future researches. Code is available at https://github.com/whai362/PVT.
DenseGAP: Graph-Structured Dense Correspondence Learning with Anchor Points
Establishing dense correspondence between two images is a fundamental computer vision problem, which is typically tackled by matching local feature descriptors. However, without global awareness, such local features are often insufficient for disambiguating similar regions. And computing the pairwise feature correlation across images is both computation-expensive and memory-intensive. To make the local features aware of the global context and improve their matching accuracy, we introduce DenseGAP, a new solution for efficient Dense correspondence learning with a Graph-structured neural network conditioned on Anchor Points. Specifically, we first propose a graph structure that utilizes anchor points to provide sparse but reliable prior on inter- and intra-image context and propagates them to all image points via directed edges. We also design a graph-structured network to broadcast multi-level contexts via light-weighted message-passing layers and generate high-resolution feature maps at low memory cost. Finally, based on the predicted feature maps, we introduce a coarse-to-fine framework for accurate correspondence prediction using cycle consistency. Our feature descriptors capture both local and global information, thus enabling a continuous feature field for querying arbitrary points at high resolution. Through comprehensive ablative experiments and evaluations on large-scale indoor and outdoor datasets, we demonstrate that our method advances the state-of-the-art of correspondence learning on most benchmarks.
SBCFormer: Lightweight Network Capable of Full-size ImageNet Classification at 1 FPS on Single Board Computers
Computer vision has become increasingly prevalent in solving real-world problems across diverse domains, including smart agriculture, fishery, and livestock management. These applications may not require processing many image frames per second, leading practitioners to use single board computers (SBCs). Although many lightweight networks have been developed for mobile/edge devices, they primarily target smartphones with more powerful processors and not SBCs with the low-end CPUs. This paper introduces a CNN-ViT hybrid network called SBCFormer, which achieves high accuracy and fast computation on such low-end CPUs. The hardware constraints of these CPUs make the Transformer's attention mechanism preferable to convolution. However, using attention on low-end CPUs presents a challenge: high-resolution internal feature maps demand excessive computational resources, but reducing their resolution results in the loss of local image details. SBCFormer introduces an architectural design to address this issue. As a result, SBCFormer achieves the highest trade-off between accuracy and speed on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with an ARM-Cortex A72 CPU. For the first time, it achieves an ImageNet-1K top-1 accuracy of around 80% at a speed of 1.0 frame/sec on the SBC. Code is available at https://github.com/xyongLu/SBCFormer.
Spherical Space Feature Decomposition for Guided Depth Map Super-Resolution
Guided depth map super-resolution (GDSR), as a hot topic in multi-modal image processing, aims to upsample low-resolution (LR) depth maps with additional information involved in high-resolution (HR) RGB images from the same scene. The critical step of this task is to effectively extract domain-shared and domain-private RGB/depth features. In addition, three detailed issues, namely blurry edges, noisy surfaces, and over-transferred RGB texture, need to be addressed. In this paper, we propose the Spherical Space feature Decomposition Network (SSDNet) to solve the above issues. To better model cross-modality features, Restormer block-based RGB/depth encoders are employed for extracting local-global features. Then, the extracted features are mapped to the spherical space to complete the separation of private features and the alignment of shared features. Shared features of RGB are fused with the depth features to complete the GDSR task. Subsequently, a spherical contrast refinement (SCR) module is proposed to further address the detail issues. Patches that are classified according to imperfect categories are input into the SCR module, where the patch features are pulled closer to the ground truth and pushed away from the corresponding imperfect samples in the spherical feature space via contrastive learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results on four test datasets, as well as successfully generalize to real-world scenes. The code is available at https://github.com/Zhaozixiang1228/GDSR-SSDNet.
Distillation-Supervised Convolutional Low-Rank Adaptation for Efficient Image Super-Resolution
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in efficient image super-resolution. However, for CNN-based methods, performance gains often require deeper networks and larger feature maps, which increase complexity and inference costs. Inspired by LoRA's success in fine-tuning large language models, we explore its application to lightweight models and propose Distillation-Supervised Convolutional Low-Rank Adaptation (DSCLoRA), which improves model performance without increasing architectural complexity or inference costs. Specifically, we integrate ConvLoRA into the efficient SR network SPAN by replacing the SPAB module with the proposed SConvLB module and incorporating ConvLoRA layers into both the pixel shuffle block and its preceding convolutional layer. DSCLoRA leverages low-rank decomposition for parameter updates and employs a spatial feature affinity-based knowledge distillation strategy to transfer second-order statistical information from teacher models (pre-trained SPAN) to student models (ours). This method preserves the core knowledge of lightweight models and facilitates optimal solution discovery under certain conditions. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that DSCLoRA improves PSNR and SSIM over SPAN while maintaining its efficiency and competitive image quality. Notably, DSCLoRA ranked first in the Overall Performance Track of the NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge. Our code and models are made publicly available at https://github.com/Yaozzz666/DSCF-SR.
HarDNet: A Low Memory Traffic Network
State-of-the-art neural network architectures such as ResNet, MobileNet, and DenseNet have achieved outstanding accuracy over low MACs and small model size counterparts. However, these metrics might not be accurate for predicting the inference time. We suggest that memory traffic for accessing intermediate feature maps can be a factor dominating the inference latency, especially in such tasks as real-time object detection and semantic segmentation of high-resolution video. We propose a Harmonic Densely Connected Network to achieve high efficiency in terms of both low MACs and memory traffic. The new network achieves 35%, 36%, 30%, 32%, and 45% inference time reduction compared with FC-DenseNet-103, DenseNet-264, ResNet-50, ResNet-152, and SSD-VGG, respectively. We use tools including Nvidia profiler and ARM Scale-Sim to measure the memory traffic and verify that the inference latency is indeed proportional to the memory traffic consumption and the proposed network consumes low memory traffic. We conclude that one should take memory traffic into consideration when designing neural network architectures for high-resolution applications at the edge.
EmerDiff: Emerging Pixel-level Semantic Knowledge in Diffusion Models
Diffusion models have recently received increasing research attention for their remarkable transfer abilities in semantic segmentation tasks. However, generating fine-grained segmentation masks with diffusion models often requires additional training on annotated datasets, leaving it unclear to what extent pre-trained diffusion models alone understand the semantic relations of their generated images. To address this question, we leverage the semantic knowledge extracted from Stable Diffusion (SD) and aim to develop an image segmentor capable of generating fine-grained segmentation maps without any additional training. The primary difficulty stems from the fact that semantically meaningful feature maps typically exist only in the spatially lower-dimensional layers, which poses a challenge in directly extracting pixel-level semantic relations from these feature maps. To overcome this issue, our framework identifies semantic correspondences between image pixels and spatial locations of low-dimensional feature maps by exploiting SD's generation process and utilizes them for constructing image-resolution segmentation maps. In extensive experiments, the produced segmentation maps are demonstrated to be well delineated and capture detailed parts of the images, indicating the existence of highly accurate pixel-level semantic knowledge in diffusion models.
On the Use of Hierarchical Vision Foundation Models for Low-Cost Human Mesh Recovery and Pose Estimation
In this work, we aim to develop simple and efficient models for human mesh recovery (HMR) and its predecessor task, human pose estimation (HPE). State-of-the-art HMR methods, such as HMR2.0 and its successors, rely on large, non-hierarchical vision transformers as encoders, which are inherited from the corresponding HPE models like ViTPose. To establish baselines across varying computational budgets, we first construct three lightweight HMR2.0 variants by adapting the corresponding ViTPose models. In addition, we propose leveraging the early stages of hierarchical vision foundation models (VFMs), including Swin Transformer, GroupMixFormer, and VMamba, as encoders. This design is motivated by the observation that intermediate stages of hierarchical VFMs produce feature maps with resolutions comparable to or higher than those of non-hierarchical counterparts. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 27 hierarchical-VFM-based HMR and HPE models, demonstrating that using only the first two or three stages achieves performance on par with full-stage models. Moreover, we show that the resulting truncated models exhibit better trade-offs between accuracy and computational efficiency compared to existing lightweight alternatives. The source code is available at https://github.com/nttcom/TruncHierVFM.
Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network
Recently, several models based on deep neural networks have achieved great success in terms of both reconstruction accuracy and computational performance for single image super-resolution. In these methods, the low resolution (LR) input image is upscaled to the high resolution (HR) space using a single filter, commonly bicubic interpolation, before reconstruction. This means that the super-resolution (SR) operation is performed in HR space. We demonstrate that this is sub-optimal and adds computational complexity. In this paper, we present the first convolutional neural network (CNN) capable of real-time SR of 1080p videos on a single K2 GPU. To achieve this, we propose a novel CNN architecture where the feature maps are extracted in the LR space. In addition, we introduce an efficient sub-pixel convolution layer which learns an array of upscaling filters to upscale the final LR feature maps into the HR output. By doing so, we effectively replace the handcrafted bicubic filter in the SR pipeline with more complex upscaling filters specifically trained for each feature map, whilst also reducing the computational complexity of the overall SR operation. We evaluate the proposed approach using images and videos from publicly available datasets and show that it performs significantly better (+0.15dB on Images and +0.39dB on Videos) and is an order of magnitude faster than previous CNN-based methods.
JAFAR: Jack up Any Feature at Any Resolution
Foundation Vision Encoders have become essential for a wide range of dense vision tasks. However, their low-resolution spatial feature outputs necessitate feature upsampling to produce the high-resolution modalities required for downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce JAFAR, a lightweight and flexible feature upsampler that enhances the spatial resolution of visual features from any Foundation Vision Encoder to an arbitrary target resolution. JAFAR employs an attention-based module designed to promote semantic alignment between high-resolution queries, derived from low-level image features, and semantically enriched low-resolution keys, using Spatial Feature Transform (SFT) modulation. Notably, despite the absence of high-resolution supervision, we demonstrate that learning at low upsampling ratios and resolutions generalizes remarkably well to significantly higher output scales. Extensive experiments show that JAFAR effectively recovers fine-grained spatial details and consistently outperforms existing feature upsampling methods across a diverse set of downstream tasks. Project page at https://jafar-upsampler.github.io
Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks
We propose a deep learning method for single image super-resolution (SR). Our method directly learns an end-to-end mapping between the low/high-resolution images. The mapping is represented as a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) that takes the low-resolution image as the input and outputs the high-resolution one. We further show that traditional sparse-coding-based SR methods can also be viewed as a deep convolutional network. But unlike traditional methods that handle each component separately, our method jointly optimizes all layers. Our deep CNN has a lightweight structure, yet demonstrates state-of-the-art restoration quality, and achieves fast speed for practical on-line usage. We explore different network structures and parameter settings to achieve trade-offs between performance and speed. Moreover, we extend our network to cope with three color channels simultaneously, and show better overall reconstruction quality.
FeatUp: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Features at Any Resolution
Deep features are a cornerstone of computer vision research, capturing image semantics and enabling the community to solve downstream tasks even in the zero- or few-shot regime. However, these features often lack the spatial resolution to directly perform dense prediction tasks like segmentation and depth prediction because models aggressively pool information over large areas. In this work, we introduce FeatUp, a task- and model-agnostic framework to restore lost spatial information in deep features. We introduce two variants of FeatUp: one that guides features with high-resolution signal in a single forward pass, and one that fits an implicit model to a single image to reconstruct features at any resolution. Both approaches use a multi-view consistency loss with deep analogies to NeRFs. Our features retain their original semantics and can be swapped into existing applications to yield resolution and performance gains even without re-training. We show that FeatUp significantly outperforms other feature upsampling and image super-resolution approaches in class activation map generation, transfer learning for segmentation and depth prediction, and end-to-end training for semantic segmentation.
SNAP: Self-Supervised Neural Maps for Visual Positioning and Semantic Understanding
Semantic 2D maps are commonly used by humans and machines for navigation purposes, whether it's walking or driving. However, these maps have limitations: they lack detail, often contain inaccuracies, and are difficult to create and maintain, especially in an automated fashion. Can we use raw imagery to automatically create better maps that can be easily interpreted by both humans and machines? We introduce SNAP, a deep network that learns rich neural 2D maps from ground-level and overhead images. We train our model to align neural maps estimated from different inputs, supervised only with camera poses over tens of millions of StreetView images. SNAP can resolve the location of challenging image queries beyond the reach of traditional methods, outperforming the state of the art in localization by a large margin. Moreover, our neural maps encode not only geometry and appearance but also high-level semantics, discovered without explicit supervision. This enables effective pre-training for data-efficient semantic scene understanding, with the potential to unlock cost-efficient creation of more detailed maps.
AutoLUT: LUT-Based Image Super-Resolution with Automatic Sampling and Adaptive Residual Learning
In recent years, the increasing popularity of Hi-DPI screens has driven a rising demand for high-resolution images. However, the limited computational power of edge devices poses a challenge in deploying complex super-resolution neural networks, highlighting the need for efficient methods. While prior works have made significant progress, they have not fully exploited pixel-level information. Moreover, their reliance on fixed sampling patterns limits both accuracy and the ability to capture fine details in low-resolution images. To address these challenges, we introduce two plug-and-play modules designed to capture and leverage pixel information effectively in Look-Up Table (LUT) based super-resolution networks. Our method introduces Automatic Sampling (AutoSample), a flexible LUT sampling approach where sampling weights are automatically learned during training to adapt to pixel variations and expand the receptive field without added inference cost. We also incorporate Adaptive Residual Learning (AdaRL) to enhance inter-layer connections, enabling detailed information flow and improving the network's ability to reconstruct fine details. Our method achieves significant performance improvements on both MuLUT and SPF-LUT while maintaining similar storage sizes. Specifically, for MuLUT, we achieve a PSNR improvement of approximately +0.20 dB improvement on average across five datasets. For SPF-LUT, with more than a 50% reduction in storage space and about a 2/3 reduction in inference time, our method still maintains performance comparable to the original. The code is available at https://github.com/SuperKenVery/AutoLUT.
LoftUp: Learning a Coordinate-Based Feature Upsampler for Vision Foundation Models
Vision foundation models (VFMs) such as DINOv2 and CLIP have achieved impressive results on various downstream tasks, but their limited feature resolution hampers performance in applications requiring pixel-level understanding. Feature upsampling offers a promising direction to address this challenge. In this work, we identify two critical factors for enhancing feature upsampling: the upsampler architecture and the training objective. For the upsampler architecture, we introduce a coordinate-based cross-attention transformer that integrates the high-resolution images with coordinates and low-resolution VFM features to generate sharp, high-quality features. For the training objective, we propose constructing high-resolution pseudo-groundtruth features by leveraging class-agnostic masks and self-distillation. Our approach effectively captures fine-grained details and adapts flexibly to various input and feature resolutions. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing feature upsampling techniques across various downstream tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/andrehuang/loftup.
CartoMark: a benchmark dataset for map pattern recognition and 1 map content retrieval with machine intelligence
Maps are fundamental medium to visualize and represent the real word in a simple and 16 philosophical way. The emergence of the 3rd wave information has made a proportion of maps are available to be generated ubiquitously, which would significantly enrich the dimensions and perspectives to understand the characteristics of the real world. However, a majority of map dataset have never been discovered, acquired and effectively used, and the map data used in many applications might not be completely fitted for the authentic demands of these applications. This challenge is emerged due to the lack of numerous well-labelled benchmark datasets for implementing the deep learning approaches into identifying complicated map content. Thus, we develop a large-scale benchmark dataset that includes well-labelled dataset for map text annotation recognition, map scene classification, map super-resolution reconstruction, and map style transferring. Furthermore, these well-labelled datasets would facilitate the state-of-the-art machine intelligence technologies to conduct map feature detection, map pattern recognition and map content retrieval. We hope our efforts would be useful for AI-enhanced cartographical applications.
Beyond LLaVA-HD: Diving into High-Resolution Large Multimodal Models
Seeing clearly with high resolution is a foundation of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), which has been proven to be vital for visual perception and reasoning. Existing works usually employ a straightforward resolution upscaling method, where the image consists of global and local branches, with the latter being the sliced image patches but resized to the same resolution as the former. This means that higher resolution requires more local patches, resulting in exorbitant computational expenses, and meanwhile, the dominance of local image tokens may diminish the global context. In this paper, we dive into the problems and propose a new framework as well as an elaborate optimization strategy. Specifically, we extract contextual information from the global view using a mixture of adapters, based on the observation that different adapters excel at different tasks. With regard to local patches, learnable query embeddings are introduced to reduce image tokens, the most important tokens accounting for the user question will be further selected by a similarity-based selector. Our empirical results demonstrate a `less is more' pattern, where utilizing fewer but more informative local image tokens leads to improved performance. Besides, a significant challenge lies in the training strategy, as simultaneous end-to-end training of the global mining block and local compression block does not yield optimal results. We thus advocate for an alternating training way, ensuring balanced learning between global and local aspects. Finally, we also introduce a challenging dataset with high requirements for image detail, enhancing the training of the local compression layer. The proposed method, termed LMM with Sophisticated Tasks, Local image compression, and Mixture of global Experts (SliME), achieves leading performance across various benchmarks with only 2 million training data.
GeoPixel: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model in Remote Sensing
Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have recognized fine-grained grounding as an imperative factor of visual understanding and dialogue. However, the benefits of such representation in LMMs are limited to the natural image domain, and these models perform poorly for remote sensing (RS). The distinct overhead viewpoint, scale variation, and presence of small objects in high-resolution RS imagery present a unique challenge in region-level comprehension. Moreover, the development of the grounding conversation capability of LMMs within RS is hindered by the lack of granular, RS domain-specific grounded data. Addressing these limitations, we propose GeoPixel - the first end-to-end high resolution RS-LMM that supports pixel-level grounding. This capability allows fine-grained visual perception by generating interleaved masks in conversation. GeoPixel supports up to 4K HD resolution in any aspect ratio, ideal for high-precision RS image analysis. To support the grounded conversation generation (GCG) in RS imagery, we curate a visually grounded dataset GeoPixelD through a semi-automated pipeline that utilizes set-of-marks prompting and spatial priors tailored for RS data to methodically control the data generation process. GeoPixel demonstrates superior performance in pixel-level comprehension, surpassing existing LMMs in both single-target and multi-target segmentation tasks. Our methodological ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each component in the overall architecture. Our code and data will be publicly released.
Recognizability Embedding Enhancement for Very Low-Resolution Face Recognition and Quality Estimation
Very low-resolution face recognition (VLRFR) poses unique challenges, such as tiny regions of interest and poor resolution due to extreme standoff distance or wide viewing angle of the acquisition devices. In this paper, we study principled approaches to elevate the recognizability of a face in the embedding space instead of the visual quality. We first formulate a robust learning-based face recognizability measure, namely recognizability index (RI), based on two criteria: (i) proximity of each face embedding against the unrecognizable faces cluster center and (ii) closeness of each face embedding against its positive and negative class prototypes. We then devise an index diversion loss to push the hard-to-recognize face embedding with low RI away from unrecognizable faces cluster to boost the RI, which reflects better recognizability. Additionally, a perceptibility attention mechanism is introduced to attend to the most recognizable face regions, which offers better explanatory and discriminative traits for embedding learning. Our proposed model is trained end-to-end and simultaneously serves recognizability-aware embedding learning and face quality estimation. To address VLRFR, our extensive evaluations on three challenging low-resolution datasets and face quality assessment demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art methods.
Improving Feature Stability during Upsampling -- Spectral Artifacts and the Importance of Spatial Context
Pixel-wise predictions are required in a wide variety of tasks such as image restoration, image segmentation, or disparity estimation. Common models involve several stages of data resampling, in which the resolution of feature maps is first reduced to aggregate information and then increased to generate a high-resolution output. Previous works have shown that resampling operations are subject to artifacts such as aliasing. During downsampling, aliases have been shown to compromise the prediction stability of image classifiers. During upsampling, they have been leveraged to detect generated content. Yet, the effect of aliases during upsampling has not yet been discussed w.r.t. the stability and robustness of pixel-wise predictions. While falling under the same term (aliasing), the challenges for correct upsampling in neural networks differ significantly from those during downsampling: when downsampling, some high frequencies can not be correctly represented and have to be removed to avoid aliases. However, when upsampling for pixel-wise predictions, we actually require the model to restore such high frequencies that can not be encoded in lower resolutions. The application of findings from signal processing is therefore a necessary but not a sufficient condition to achieve the desirable output. In contrast, we find that the availability of large spatial context during upsampling allows to provide stable, high-quality pixel-wise predictions, even when fully learning all filter weights.
Undertrained Image Reconstruction for Realistic Degradation in Blind Image Super-Resolution
Most super-resolution (SR) models struggle with real-world low-resolution (LR) images. This issue arises because the degradation characteristics in the synthetic datasets differ from those in real-world LR images. Since SR models are trained on pairs of high-resolution (HR) and LR images generated by downsampling, they are optimized for simple degradation. However, real-world LR images contain complex degradation caused by factors such as the imaging process and JPEG compression. Due to these differences in degradation characteristics, most SR models perform poorly on real-world LR images. This study proposes a dataset generation method using undertrained image reconstruction models. These models have the property of reconstructing low-quality images with diverse degradation from input images. By leveraging this property, this study generates LR images with diverse degradation from HR images to construct the datasets. Fine-tuning pre-trained SR models on our generated datasets improves noise removal and blur reduction, enhancing performance on real-world LR images. Furthermore, an analysis of the datasets reveals that degradation diversity contributes to performance improvements, whereas color differences between HR and LR images may degrade performance. 11 pages, (11 figures and 2 tables)
Feature Refinement to Improve High Resolution Image Inpainting
In this paper, we address the problem of degradation in inpainting quality of neural networks operating at high resolutions. Inpainting networks are often unable to generate globally coherent structures at resolutions higher than their training set. This is partially attributed to the receptive field remaining static, despite an increase in image resolution. Although downscaling the image prior to inpainting produces coherent structure, it inherently lacks detail present at higher resolutions. To get the best of both worlds, we optimize the intermediate featuremaps of a network by minimizing a multiscale consistency loss at inference. This runtime optimization improves the inpainting results and establishes a new state-of-the-art for high resolution inpainting. Code is available at: https://github.com/geomagical/lama-with-refiner/tree/refinement.
SegEarth-OV: Towards Traning-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentation for Remote Sensing Images
Remote sensing image plays an irreplaceable role in fields such as agriculture, water resources, military, and disaster relief. Pixel-level interpretation is a critical aspect of remote sensing image applications; however, a prevalent limitation remains the need for extensive manual annotation. For this, we try to introduce open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) into the remote sensing context. However, due to the sensitivity of remote sensing images to low-resolution features, distorted target shapes and ill-fitting boundaries are exhibited in the prediction mask. To tackle this issue, we propose a simple and general upsampler, SimFeatUp, to restore lost spatial information in deep features in a training-free style. Further, based on the observation of the abnormal response of local patch tokens to [CLS] token in CLIP, we propose to execute a straightforward subtraction operation to alleviate the global bias in patch tokens. Extensive experiments are conducted on 17 remote sensing datasets spanning semantic segmentation, building extraction, road detection, and flood detection tasks. Our method achieves an average of 5.8%, 8.2%, 4%, and 15.3% improvement over state-of-the-art methods on 4 tasks. All codes are released. https://earth-insights.github.io/SegEarth-OV
Concentric Spherical GNN for 3D Representation Learning
Learning 3D representations that generalize well to arbitrarily oriented inputs is a challenge of practical importance in applications varying from computer vision to physics and chemistry. We propose a novel multi-resolution convolutional architecture for learning over concentric spherical feature maps, of which the single sphere representation is a special case. Our hierarchical architecture is based on alternatively learning to incorporate both intra-sphere and inter-sphere information. We show the applicability of our method for two different types of 3D inputs, mesh objects, which can be regularly sampled, and point clouds, which are irregularly distributed. We also propose an efficient mapping of point clouds to concentric spherical images, thereby bridging spherical convolutions on grids with general point clouds. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving state-of-the-art performance on 3D classification tasks with rotated data.
CubeDiff: Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Models for Panorama Generation
We introduce a novel method for generating 360{\deg} panoramas from text prompts or images. Our approach leverages recent advances in 3D generation by employing multi-view diffusion models to jointly synthesize the six faces of a cubemap. Unlike previous methods that rely on processing equirectangular projections or autoregressive generation, our method treats each face as a standard perspective image, simplifying the generation process and enabling the use of existing multi-view diffusion models. We demonstrate that these models can be adapted to produce high-quality cubemaps without requiring correspondence-aware attention layers. Our model allows for fine-grained text control, generates high resolution panorama images and generalizes well beyond its training set, whilst achieving state-of-the-art results, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Project page: https://cubediff.github.io/
Accelerating the Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network
As a successful deep model applied in image super-resolution (SR), the Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (SRCNN) has demonstrated superior performance to the previous hand-crafted models either in speed and restoration quality. However, the high computational cost still hinders it from practical usage that demands real-time performance (24 fps). In this paper, we aim at accelerating the current SRCNN, and propose a compact hourglass-shape CNN structure for faster and better SR. We re-design the SRCNN structure mainly in three aspects. First, we introduce a deconvolution layer at the end of the network, then the mapping is learned directly from the original low-resolution image (without interpolation) to the high-resolution one. Second, we reformulate the mapping layer by shrinking the input feature dimension before mapping and expanding back afterwards. Third, we adopt smaller filter sizes but more mapping layers. The proposed model achieves a speed up of more than 40 times with even superior restoration quality. Further, we present the parameter settings that can achieve real-time performance on a generic CPU while still maintaining good performance. A corresponding transfer strategy is also proposed for fast training and testing across different upscaling factors.
PRS: Sharp Feature Priors for Resolution-Free Surface Remeshing
Surface reconstruction with preservation of geometric features is a challenging computer vision task. Despite significant progress in implicit shape reconstruction, state-of-the-art mesh extraction methods often produce aliased, perceptually distorted surfaces and lack scalability to high-resolution 3D shapes. We present a data-driven approach for automatic feature detection and remeshing that requires only a coarse, aliased mesh as input and scales to arbitrary resolution reconstructions. We define and learn a collection of surface-based fields to (1) capture sharp geometric features in the shape with an implicit vertexwise model and (2) approximate improvements in normals alignment obtained by applying edge-flips with an edgewise model. To support scaling to arbitrary complexity shapes, we learn our fields using local triangulated patches, fusing estimates on complete surface meshes. Our feature remeshing algorithm integrates the learned fields as sharp feature priors and optimizes vertex placement and mesh connectivity for maximum expected surface improvement. On a challenging collection of high-resolution shape reconstructions in the ABC dataset, our algorithm improves over state-of-the-art by 26% normals F-score and 42% perceptual RMSE_{v}.
Feast Your Eyes: Mixture-of-Resolution Adaptation for Multimodal Large Language Models
Despite remarkable progress, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are still inferior in granular visual recognition. Contrary to previous works, we study this problem from the perspective of image resolution, and reveal that a combination of low- and high-resolution visual features can effectively mitigate this shortcoming. Based on this observation, we propose a novel and efficient method for MLLMs, termed Mixture-of-Resolution Adaptation (MRA). In particular, MRA adopts two visual pathways for images with different resolutions, where high-resolution visual information is embedded into the low-resolution pathway via the novel mixture-of-resolution adapters (MR-Adapters). This design also greatly reduces the input sequence length of MLLMs. To validate MRA, we apply it to a recent MLLM called LLaVA, and term the new model LLaVA-HR. We conduct extensive experiments on 11 vision-language (VL) tasks, which show that LLaVA-HR outperforms existing MLLMs on 8 VL tasks, e.g., +9.4% on TextVQA. More importantly, both training and inference of LLaVA-HR remain efficient with MRA, e.g., 20 training hours and 3times inference speed than LLaVA-1.5. Source codes are released at: https://github.com/luogen1996/LLaVA-HR.
Text2Earth: Unlocking Text-driven Remote Sensing Image Generation with a Global-Scale Dataset and a Foundation Model
Generative foundation models have advanced large-scale text-driven natural image generation, becoming a prominent research trend across various vertical domains. However, in the remote sensing field, there is still a lack of research on large-scale text-to-image (text2image) generation technology. Existing remote sensing image-text datasets are small in scale and confined to specific geographic areas and scene types. Besides, existing text2image methods have struggled to achieve global-scale, multi-resolution controllable, and unbounded image generation. To address these challenges, this paper presents two key contributions: the Git-10M dataset and the Text2Earth foundation model. Git-10M is a global-scale image-text dataset comprising 10 million image-text pairs, 5 times larger than the previous largest one. The dataset covers a wide range of geographic scenes and contains resolution information, significantly surpassing existing datasets in both size and diversity. Building on Git-10M, we propose Text2Earth, a 1.3 billion parameter generative foundation model based on the diffusion framework to model global-scale remote sensing scenes. Text2Earth integrates a resolution guidance mechanism, enabling users to specify image resolutions. A dynamic condition adaptation strategy is proposed for training and inference to improve image quality. Text2Earth excels in zero-shot text2image generation and demonstrates robust generalization and flexibility across multiple tasks, including unbounded scene construction, image editing, and cross-modal image generation. This robust capability surpasses previous models restricted to the basic fixed size and limited scene types. On the previous benchmark dataset, Text2Earth outperforms previous models with an improvement of +26.23 FID and +20.95% Zero-shot Cls-OA metric.Our project page is https://chen-yang-liu.github.io/Text2Earth
OpenSatMap: A Fine-grained High-resolution Satellite Dataset for Large-scale Map Construction
In this paper, we propose OpenSatMap, a fine-grained, high-resolution satellite dataset for large-scale map construction. Map construction is one of the foundations of the transportation industry, such as navigation and autonomous driving. Extracting road structures from satellite images is an efficient way to construct large-scale maps. However, existing satellite datasets provide only coarse semantic-level labels with a relatively low resolution (up to level 19), impeding the advancement of this field. In contrast, the proposed OpenSatMap (1) has fine-grained instance-level annotations; (2) consists of high-resolution images (level 20); (3) is currently the largest one of its kind; (4) collects data with high diversity. Moreover, OpenSatMap covers and aligns with the popular nuScenes dataset and Argoverse 2 dataset to potentially advance autonomous driving technologies. By publishing and maintaining the dataset, we provide a high-quality benchmark for satellite-based map construction and downstream tasks like autonomous driving.
Geospecific View Generation -- Geometry-Context Aware High-resolution Ground View Inference from Satellite Views
Predicting realistic ground views from satellite imagery in urban scenes is a challenging task due to the significant view gaps between satellite and ground-view images. We propose a novel pipeline to tackle this challenge, by generating geospecifc views that maximally respect the weak geometry and texture from multi-view satellite images. Different from existing approaches that hallucinate images from cues such as partial semantics or geometry from overhead satellite images, our method directly predicts ground-view images at geolocation by using a comprehensive set of information from the satellite image, resulting in ground-level images with a resolution boost at a factor of ten or more. We leverage a novel building refinement method to reduce geometric distortions in satellite data at ground level, which ensures the creation of accurate conditions for view synthesis using diffusion networks. Moreover, we proposed a novel geospecific prior, which prompts distribution learning of diffusion models to respect image samples that are closer to the geolocation of the predicted images. We demonstrate our pipeline is the first to generate close-to-real and geospecific ground views merely based on satellite images.
No Pixel Left Behind: A Detail-Preserving Architecture for Robust High-Resolution AI-Generated Image Detection
The rapid growth of high-resolution, meticulously crafted AI-generated images poses a significant challenge to existing detection methods, which are often trained and evaluated on low-resolution, automatically generated datasets that do not align with the complexities of high-resolution scenarios. A common practice is to resize or center-crop high-resolution images to fit standard network inputs. However, without full coverage of all pixels, such strategies risk either obscuring subtle, high-frequency artifacts or discarding information from uncovered regions, leading to input information loss. In this paper, we introduce the High-Resolution Detail-Aggregation Network (HiDA-Net), a novel framework that ensures no pixel is left behind. We use the Feature Aggregation Module (FAM), which fuses features from multiple full-resolution local tiles with a down-sampled global view of the image. These local features are aggregated and fused with global representations for final prediction, ensuring that native-resolution details are preserved and utilized for detection. To enhance robustness against challenges such as localized AI manipulations and compression, we introduce Token-wise Forgery Localization (TFL) module for fine-grained spatial sensitivity and JPEG Quality Factor Estimation (QFE) module to disentangle generative artifacts from compression noise explicitly. Furthermore, to facilitate future research, we introduce HiRes-50K, a new challenging benchmark consisting of 50,568 images with up to 64 megapixels. Extensive experiments show that HiDA-Net achieves state-of-the-art, increasing accuracy by over 13% on the challenging Chameleon dataset and 10% on our HiRes-50K.
DendroMap: Visual Exploration of Large-Scale Image Datasets for Machine Learning with Treemaps
In this paper, we present DendroMap, a novel approach to interactively exploring large-scale image datasets for machine learning (ML). ML practitioners often explore image datasets by generating a grid of images or projecting high-dimensional representations of images into 2-D using dimensionality reduction techniques (e.g., t-SNE). However, neither approach effectively scales to large datasets because images are ineffectively organized and interactions are insufficiently supported. To address these challenges, we develop DendroMap by adapting Treemaps, a well-known visualization technique. DendroMap effectively organizes images by extracting hierarchical cluster structures from high-dimensional representations of images. It enables users to make sense of the overall distributions of datasets and interactively zoom into specific areas of interests at multiple levels of abstraction. Our case studies with widely-used image datasets for deep learning demonstrate that users can discover insights about datasets and trained models by examining the diversity of images, identifying underperforming subgroups, and analyzing classification errors. We conducted a user study that evaluates the effectiveness of DendroMap in grouping and searching tasks by comparing it with a gridified version of t-SNE and found that participants preferred DendroMap. DendroMap is available at https://div-lab.github.io/dendromap/.
Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation
This is an official pytorch implementation of Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation. In this work, we are interested in the human pose estimation problem with a focus on learning reliable high-resolution representations. Most existing methods recover high-resolution representations from low-resolution representations produced by a high-to-low resolution network. Instead, our proposed network maintains high-resolution representations through the whole process. We start from a high-resolution subnetwork as the first stage, gradually add high-to-low resolution subnetworks one by one to form more stages, and connect the mutli-resolution subnetworks in parallel. We conduct repeated multi-scale fusions such that each of the high-to-low resolution representations receives information from other parallel representations over and over, leading to rich high-resolution representations. As a result, the predicted keypoint heatmap is potentially more accurate and spatially more precise. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our network through the superior pose estimation results over two benchmark datasets: the COCO keypoint detection dataset and the MPII Human Pose dataset. The code and models have been publicly available at https://github.com/leoxiaobin/deep-high-resolution-net.pytorch.
Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement
With the goal of recovering high-quality image content from its degraded version, image restoration enjoys numerous applications, such as in surveillance, computational photography, medical imaging, and remote sensing. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved dramatic improvements over conventional approaches for image restoration task. Existing CNN-based methods typically operate either on full-resolution or on progressively low-resolution representations. In the former case, spatially precise but contextually less robust results are achieved, while in the latter case, semantically reliable but spatially less accurate outputs are generated. In this paper, we present a novel architecture with the collective goals of maintaining spatially-precise high-resolution representations through the entire network and receiving strong contextual information from the low-resolution representations. The core of our approach is a multi-scale residual block containing several key elements: (a) parallel multi-resolution convolution streams for extracting multi-scale features, (b) information exchange across the multi-resolution streams, (c) spatial and channel attention mechanisms for capturing contextual information, and (d) attention based multi-scale feature aggregation. In a nutshell, our approach learns an enriched set of features that combines contextual information from multiple scales, while simultaneously preserving the high-resolution spatial details. Extensive experiments on five real image benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method, named as MIRNet, achieves state-of-the-art results for a variety of image processing tasks, including image denoising, super-resolution, and image enhancement. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MIRNet.
See More Details: Efficient Image Super-Resolution by Experts Mining
Reconstructing high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs poses a significant challenge in image super-resolution (SR). While recent approaches have demonstrated the efficacy of intricate operations customized for various objectives, the straightforward stacking of these disparate operations can result in a substantial computational burden, hampering their practical utility. In response, we introduce SeemoRe, an efficient SR model employing expert mining. Our approach strategically incorporates experts at different levels, adopting a collaborative methodology. At the macro scale, our experts address rank-wise and spatial-wise informative features, providing a holistic understanding. Subsequently, the model delves into the subtleties of rank choice by leveraging a mixture of low-rank experts. By tapping into experts specialized in distinct key factors crucial for accurate SR, our model excels in uncovering intricate intra-feature details. This collaborative approach is reminiscent of the concept of "see more", allowing our model to achieve an optimal performance with minimal computational costs in efficient settings. The source will be publicly made available at https://github.com/eduardzamfir/seemoredetails
TokenPacker: Efficient Visual Projector for Multimodal LLM
The visual projector serves as an essential bridge between the visual encoder and the Large Language Model (LLM) in a Multimodal LLM (MLLM). Typically, MLLMs adopt a simple MLP to preserve all visual contexts via one-to-one transformation. However, the visual tokens are redundant and can be considerably increased when dealing with high-resolution images, impairing the efficiency of MLLMs significantly. Some recent works have introduced resampler or abstractor to reduce the number of resulting visual tokens. Unfortunately, they fail to capture finer details and undermine the visual reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. In this work, we propose a novel visual projector, which adopts a coarse-to-fine scheme to inject the enriched characteristics to generate the condensed visual tokens. In specific, we first interpolate the visual features as a low-resolution point query, providing the overall visual representation as the foundation. Then, we introduce a region-to-point injection module that utilizes high-resolution, multi-level region-based cues as fine-grained reference keys and values, allowing them to be fully absorbed within the corresponding local context region. This step effectively updates the coarse point query, transforming it into an enriched one for the subsequent LLM reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach compresses the visual tokens by 75%~89%, while achieves comparable or even better performance across diverse benchmarks with significantly higher efficiency. The source codes can be found at https://github.com/CircleRadon/TokenPacker.
LR0.FM: Low-Res Benchmark and Improving Robustness for Zero-Shot Classification in Foundation Models
Visual-language foundation Models (FMs) exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization across diverse tasks, largely attributed to extensive pre-training on largescale datasets. However, their robustness on low-resolution/pixelated (LR) images, a common challenge in real-world scenarios, remains underexplored. We introduce LR0.FM, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating the impact of low resolution on the zero-shot classification performance of 10 FM(s) across 66 backbones and 15 datasets. We propose a novel metric, Weighted Aggregated Robustness, to address the limitations of existing metrics and better evaluate model performance across resolutions and datasets. Our key findings show that: (i) model size positively correlates with robustness to resolution degradation, (ii) pre-training dataset quality is more important than its size, and (iii) fine-tuned and higher resolution models are less robust against LR. Our analysis further reveals that the model makes semantically reasonable predictions at LR, and the lack of fine-grained details in input adversely impacts the model's initial layers more than the deeper layers. We use these insights and introduce a simple strategy, LR-TK0, to enhance the robustness of models without compromising their pre-trained weights. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LR-TK0 for robustness against low-resolution across several datasets and its generalization capability across backbones and other approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/shyammarjit/LR0.FM
Deep Feature Factorization For Concept Discovery
We propose Deep Feature Factorization (DFF), a method capable of localizing similar semantic concepts within an image or a set of images. We use DFF to gain insight into a deep convolutional neural network's learned features, where we detect hierarchical cluster structures in feature space. This is visualized as heat maps, which highlight semantically matching regions across a set of images, revealing what the network `perceives' as similar. DFF can also be used to perform co-segmentation and co-localization, and we report state-of-the-art results on these tasks.
Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition
High-resolution representations are essential for position-sensitive vision problems, such as human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Existing state-of-the-art frameworks first encode the input image as a low-resolution representation through a subnetwork that is formed by connecting high-to-low resolution convolutions in series (e.g., ResNet, VGGNet), and then recover the high-resolution representation from the encoded low-resolution representation. Instead, our proposed network, named as High-Resolution Network (HRNet), maintains high-resolution representations through the whole process. There are two key characteristics: (i) Connect the high-to-low resolution convolution streams in parallel; (ii) Repeatedly exchange the information across resolutions. The benefit is that the resulting representation is semantically richer and spatially more precise. We show the superiority of the proposed HRNet in a wide range of applications, including human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, and object detection, suggesting that the HRNet is a stronger backbone for computer vision problems. All the codes are available at~{https://github.com/HRNet}.
POINTS1.5: Building a Vision-Language Model towards Real World Applications
Vision-language models have made significant strides recently, demonstrating superior performance across a range of tasks, e.g. optical character recognition and complex diagram analysis. Building on this trend, we introduce a new vision-language model, POINTS1.5, designed to excel in various real-world applications. POINTS1.5 is an enhancement of POINTS1.0 and incorporates several key innovations: i) We replace the original CLIP vision encoder, which had a fixed image resolution, with a NaViT-style vision encoder that supports native dynamic high resolution. This allows POINTS1.5 to process images of any resolution without needing to split them into tiles. ii) We add bilingual support to POINTS1.5, significantly enhancing its capability in Chinese. Due to the scarcity of open-source Chinese datasets for vision-language models, we collect numerous images from the Internet and annotate them using a combination of manual and automatic methods. iii) We propose a set of rigorous filtering methods for visual instruction tuning datasets. We comprehensively evaluate all these filtering methods, and choose the most effective ones to obtain the final visual instruction tuning set. Thanks to these innovations, POINTS1.5 significantly outperforms POINTS1.0 and demonstrates strong performance across a range of real-world applications. Notably, POINTS1.5-7B is trained on fewer than 4 billion tokens and ranks first on the OpenCompass leaderboard among models with fewer than 10 billion parameters
LidarScout: Direct Out-of-Core Rendering of Massive Point Clouds
Large-scale terrain scans are the basis for many important tasks, such as topographic mapping, forestry, agriculture, and infrastructure planning. The resulting point cloud data sets are so massive in size that even basic tasks like viewing take hours to days of pre-processing in order to create level-of-detail structures that allow inspecting the data set in their entirety in real time. In this paper, we propose a method that is capable of instantly visualizing massive country-sized scans with hundreds of billions of points. Upon opening the data set, we first load a sparse subsample of points and initialize an overview of the entire point cloud, immediately followed by a surface reconstruction process to generate higher-quality, hole-free heightmaps. As users start navigating towards a region of interest, we continue to prioritize the heightmap construction process to the user's viewpoint. Once a user zooms in closely, we load the full-resolution point cloud data for that region and update the corresponding height map textures with the full-resolution data. As users navigate elsewhere, full-resolution point data that is no longer needed is unloaded, but the updated heightmap textures are retained as a form of medium level of detail. Overall, our method constitutes a form of direct out-of-core rendering for massive point cloud data sets (terabytes, compressed) that requires no preprocessing and no additional disk space. Source code, executable, pre-trained model, and dataset are available at: https://github.com/cg-tuwien/lidarscout
Native Visual Understanding: Resolving Resolution Dilemmas in Vision-Language Models
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face significant challenges when dealing with the diverse resolutions and aspect ratios of real-world images, as most existing models rely on fixed, low-resolution inputs. While recent studies have explored integrating native resolution visual encoding to improve model performance, such efforts remain fragmented and lack a systematic framework within the open-source community. Moreover, existing benchmarks fall short in evaluating VLMs under varied visual conditions, often neglecting resolution as a critical factor. To address the "Resolution Dilemma" stemming from both model design and benchmark limitations, we introduce RC-Bench, a novel benchmark specifically designed to systematically evaluate VLM capabilities under extreme visual conditions, with an emphasis on resolution and aspect ratio variations. In conjunction, we propose NativeRes-LLaVA, an open-source training framework that empowers VLMs to effectively process images at their native resolutions and aspect ratios. Based on RC-Bench and NativeRes-LLaVA, we conduct comprehensive experiments on existing visual encoding strategies. The results show that Native Resolution Visual Encoding significantly improves the performance of VLMs on RC-Bench as well as other resolution-centric benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/Niujunbo2002/NativeRes-LLaVA.
ReMatching: Low-Resolution Representations for Scalable Shape Correspondence
We introduce ReMatching, a novel shape correspondence solution based on the functional maps framework. Our method, by exploiting a new and appropriate re-meshing paradigm, can target shape-matching tasks even on meshes counting millions of vertices, where the original functional maps does not apply or requires a massive computational cost. The core of our procedure is a time-efficient remeshing algorithm which constructs a low-resolution geometry while acting conservatively on the original topology and metric. These properties allow translating the functional maps optimization problem on the resulting low-resolution representation, thus enabling efficient computation of correspondences with functional map approaches. Finally, we propose an efficient technique for extending the estimated correspondence to the original meshes. We show that our method is more efficient and effective through quantitative and qualitative comparisons, outperforming state-of-the-art pipelines in quality and computational cost.
Sequence Matters: Harnessing Video Models in 3D Super-Resolution
3D super-resolution aims to reconstruct high-fidelity 3D models from low-resolution (LR) multi-view images. Early studies primarily focused on single-image super-resolution (SISR) models to upsample LR images into high-resolution images. However, these methods often lack view consistency because they operate independently on each image. Although various post-processing techniques have been extensively explored to mitigate these inconsistencies, they have yet to fully resolve the issues. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of 3D super-resolution by leveraging video super-resolution (VSR) models. By utilizing VSR models, we ensure a higher degree of spatial consistency and can reference surrounding spatial information, leading to more accurate and detailed reconstructions. Our findings reveal that VSR models can perform remarkably well even on sequences that lack precise spatial alignment. Given this observation, we propose a simple yet practical approach to align LR images without involving fine-tuning or generating 'smooth' trajectory from the trained 3D models over LR images. The experimental results show that the surprisingly simple algorithms can achieve the state-of-the-art results of 3D super-resolution tasks on standard benchmark datasets, such as the NeRF-synthetic and MipNeRF-360 datasets. Project page: https://ko-lani.github.io/Sequence-Matters
Training-free Diffusion Model Adaptation for Variable-Sized Text-to-Image Synthesis
Diffusion models (DMs) have recently gained attention with state-of-the-art performance in text-to-image synthesis. Abiding by the tradition in deep learning, DMs are trained and evaluated on the images with fixed sizes. However, users are demanding for various images with specific sizes and various aspect ratio. This paper focuses on adapting text-to-image diffusion models to handle such variety while maintaining visual fidelity. First we observe that, during the synthesis, lower resolution images suffer from incomplete object portrayal, while higher resolution images exhibit repetitively disordered presentation. Next, we establish a statistical relationship indicating that attention entropy changes with token quantity, suggesting that models aggregate spatial information in proportion to image resolution. The subsequent interpretation on our observations is that objects are incompletely depicted due to limited spatial information for low resolutions, while repetitively disorganized presentation arises from redundant spatial information for high resolutions. From this perspective, we propose a scaling factor to alleviate the change of attention entropy and mitigate the defective pattern observed. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of the proposed scaling factor, enabling models to achieve better visual effects, image quality, and text alignment. Notably, these improvements are achieved without additional training or fine-tuning techniques.
EXTD: Extremely Tiny Face Detector via Iterative Filter Reuse
In this paper, we propose a new multi-scale face detector having an extremely tiny number of parameters (EXTD),less than 0.1 million, as well as achieving comparable performance to deep heavy detectors. While existing multi-scale face detectors extract feature maps with different scales from a single backbone network, our method generates the feature maps by iteratively reusing a shared lightweight and shallow backbone network. This iterative sharing of the backbone network significantly reduces the number of parameters, and also provides the abstract image semantics captured from the higher stage of the network layers to the lower-level feature map. The proposed idea is employed by various model architectures and evaluated by extensive experiments. From the experiments from WIDER FACE dataset, we show that the proposed face detector can handle faces with various scale and conditions, and achieved comparable performance to the more massive face detectors that few hundreds and tens times heavier in model size and floating point operations.
Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform
Despite that convolutional neural networks (CNN) have recently demonstrated high-quality reconstruction for single-image super-resolution (SR), recovering natural and realistic texture remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we show that it is possible to recover textures faithful to semantic classes. In particular, we only need to modulate features of a few intermediate layers in a single network conditioned on semantic segmentation probability maps. This is made possible through a novel Spatial Feature Transform (SFT) layer that generates affine transformation parameters for spatial-wise feature modulation. SFT layers can be trained end-to-end together with the SR network using the same loss function. During testing, it accepts an input image of arbitrary size and generates a high-resolution image with just a single forward pass conditioned on the categorical priors. Our final results show that an SR network equipped with SFT can generate more realistic and visually pleasing textures in comparison to state-of-the-art SRGAN and EnhanceNet.
High-Resolution Image Inpainting using Multi-Scale Neural Patch Synthesis
Recent advances in deep learning have shown exciting promise in filling large holes in natural images with semantically plausible and context aware details, impacting fundamental image manipulation tasks such as object removal. While these learning-based methods are significantly more effective in capturing high-level features than prior techniques, they can only handle very low-resolution inputs due to memory limitations and difficulty in training. Even for slightly larger images, the inpainted regions would appear blurry and unpleasant boundaries become visible. We propose a multi-scale neural patch synthesis approach based on joint optimization of image content and texture constraints, which not only preserves contextual structures but also produces high-frequency details by matching and adapting patches with the most similar mid-layer feature correlations of a deep classification network. We evaluate our method on the ImageNet and Paris Streetview datasets and achieved state-of-the-art inpainting accuracy. We show our approach produces sharper and more coherent results than prior methods, especially for high-resolution images.
VectorMapNet: End-to-end Vectorized HD Map Learning
Autonomous driving systems require High-Definition (HD) semantic maps to navigate around urban roads. Existing solutions approach the semantic mapping problem by offline manual annotation, which suffers from serious scalability issues. Recent learning-based methods produce dense rasterized segmentation predictions to construct maps. However, these predictions do not include instance information of individual map elements and require heuristic post-processing to obtain vectorized maps. To tackle these challenges, we introduce an end-to-end vectorized HD map learning pipeline, termed VectorMapNet. VectorMapNet takes onboard sensor observations and predicts a sparse set of polylines in the bird's-eye view. This pipeline can explicitly model the spatial relation between map elements and generate vectorized maps that are friendly to downstream autonomous driving tasks. Extensive experiments show that VectorMapNet achieve strong map learning performance on both nuScenes and Argoverse2 dataset, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by 14.2 mAP and 14.6mAP. Qualitatively, VectorMapNet is capable of generating comprehensive maps and capturing fine-grained details of road geometry. To the best of our knowledge, VectorMapNet is the first work designed towards end-to-end vectorized map learning from onboard observations. Our project website is available at https://tsinghua-mars-lab.github.io/vectormapnet/.
Improving Pixel-based MIM by Reducing Wasted Modeling Capability
There has been significant progress in Masked Image Modeling (MIM). Existing MIM methods can be broadly categorized into two groups based on the reconstruction target: pixel-based and tokenizer-based approaches. The former offers a simpler pipeline and lower computational cost, but it is known to be biased toward high-frequency details. In this paper, we provide a set of empirical studies to confirm this limitation of pixel-based MIM and propose a new method that explicitly utilizes low-level features from shallow layers to aid pixel reconstruction. By incorporating this design into our base method, MAE, we reduce the wasted modeling capability of pixel-based MIM, improving its convergence and achieving non-trivial improvements across various downstream tasks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to systematically investigate multi-level feature fusion for isotropic architectures like the standard Vision Transformer (ViT). Notably, when applied to a smaller model (e.g., ViT-S), our method yields significant performance gains, such as 1.2\% on fine-tuning, 2.8\% on linear probing, and 2.6\% on semantic segmentation. Code and models are available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmpretrain.
FaVoR: Features via Voxel Rendering for Camera Relocalization
Camera relocalization methods range from dense image alignment to direct camera pose regression from a query image. Among these, sparse feature matching stands out as an efficient, versatile, and generally lightweight approach with numerous applications. However, feature-based methods often struggle with significant viewpoint and appearance changes, leading to matching failures and inaccurate pose estimates. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that leverages a globally sparse yet locally dense 3D representation of 2D features. By tracking and triangulating landmarks over a sequence of frames, we construct a sparse voxel map optimized to render image patch descriptors observed during tracking. Given an initial pose estimate, we first synthesize descriptors from the voxels using volumetric rendering and then perform feature matching to estimate the camera pose. This methodology enables the generation of descriptors for unseen views, enhancing robustness to view changes. We extensively evaluate our method on the 7-Scenes and Cambridge Landmarks datasets. Our results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art feature representation techniques in indoor environments, achieving up to a 39% improvement in median translation error. Additionally, our approach yields comparable results to other methods for outdoor scenarios while maintaining lower memory and computational costs.
CascadePSP: Toward Class-Agnostic and Very High-Resolution Segmentation via Global and Local Refinement
State-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods were almost exclusively trained on images within a fixed resolution range. These segmentations are inaccurate for very high-resolution images since using bicubic upsampling of low-resolution segmentation does not adequately capture high-resolution details along object boundaries. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address the high-resolution segmentation problem without using any high-resolution training data. The key insight is our CascadePSP network which refines and corrects local boundaries whenever possible. Although our network is trained with low-resolution segmentation data, our method is applicable to any resolution even for very high-resolution images larger than 4K. We present quantitative and qualitative studies on different datasets to show that CascadePSP can reveal pixel-accurate segmentation boundaries using our novel refinement module without any finetuning. Thus, our method can be regarded as class-agnostic. Finally, we demonstrate the application of our model to scene parsing in multi-class segmentation.
PETALface: Parameter Efficient Transfer Learning for Low-resolution Face Recognition
Pre-training on large-scale datasets and utilizing margin-based loss functions have been highly successful in training models for high-resolution face recognition. However, these models struggle with low-resolution face datasets, in which the faces lack the facial attributes necessary for distinguishing different faces. Full fine-tuning on low-resolution datasets, a naive method for adapting the model, yields inferior performance due to catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge. Additionally the domain difference between high-resolution (HR) gallery images and low-resolution (LR) probe images in low resolution datasets leads to poor convergence for a single model to adapt to both gallery and probe after fine-tuning. To this end, we propose PETALface, a Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning approach for low-resolution face recognition. Through PETALface, we attempt to solve both the aforementioned problems. (1) We solve catastrophic forgetting by leveraging the power of parameter efficient fine-tuning(PEFT). (2) We introduce two low-rank adaptation modules to the backbone, with weights adjusted based on the input image quality to account for the difference in quality for the gallery and probe images. To the best of our knowledge, PETALface is the first work leveraging the powers of PEFT for low resolution face recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms full fine-tuning on low-resolution datasets while preserving performance on high-resolution and mixed-quality datasets, all while using only 0.48% of the parameters. Code: https://kartik-3004.github.io/PETALface/
SHISRCNet: Super-resolution And Classification Network For Low-resolution Breast Cancer Histopathology Image
The rapid identification and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer, known as the killer of women, have become greatly significant for those patients. Numerous breast cancer histopathological image classification methods have been proposed. But they still suffer from two problems. (1) These methods can only hand high-resolution (HR) images. However, the low-resolution (LR) images are often collected by the digital slide scanner with limited hardware conditions. Compared with HR images, LR images often lose some key features like texture, which deeply affects the accuracy of diagnosis. (2) The existing methods have fixed receptive fields, so they can not extract and fuse multi-scale features well for images with different magnification factors. To fill these gaps, we present a Single Histopathological Image Super-Resolution Classification network (SHISRCNet), which consists of two modules: Super-Resolution (SR) and Classification (CF) modules. SR module reconstructs LR images into SR ones. CF module extracts and fuses the multi-scale features of SR images for classification. In the training stage, we introduce HR images into the CF module to enhance SHISRCNet's performance. Finally, through the joint training of these two modules, super-resolution and classified of LR images are integrated into our model. The experimental results demonstrate that the effects of our method are close to the SOTA methods with taking HR images as inputs.
Towards Efficient and Scale-Robust Ultra-High-Definition Image Demoireing
With the rapid development of mobile devices, modern widely-used mobile phones typically allow users to capture 4K resolution (i.e., ultra-high-definition) images. However, for image demoireing, a challenging task in low-level vision, existing works are generally carried out on low-resolution or synthetic images. Hence, the effectiveness of these methods on 4K resolution images is still unknown. In this paper, we explore moire pattern removal for ultra-high-definition images. To this end, we propose the first ultra-high-definition demoireing dataset (UHDM), which contains 5,000 real-world 4K resolution image pairs, and conduct a benchmark study on current state-of-the-art methods. Further, we present an efficient baseline model ESDNet for tackling 4K moire images, wherein we build a semantic-aligned scale-aware module to address the scale variation of moire patterns. Extensive experiments manifest the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin while being much more lightweight. Code and dataset are available at https://xinyu-andy.github.io/uhdm-page.
Enhancing Online Road Network Perception and Reasoning with Standard Definition Maps
Autonomous driving for urban and highway driving applications often requires High Definition (HD) maps to generate a navigation plan. Nevertheless, various challenges arise when generating and maintaining HD maps at scale. While recent online mapping methods have started to emerge, their performance especially for longer ranges is limited by heavy occlusion in dynamic environments. With these considerations in mind, our work focuses on leveraging lightweight and scalable priors-Standard Definition (SD) maps-in the development of online vectorized HD map representations. We first examine the integration of prototypical rasterized SD map representations into various online mapping architectures. Furthermore, to identify lightweight strategies, we extend the OpenLane-V2 dataset with OpenStreetMaps and evaluate the benefits of graphical SD map representations. A key finding from designing SD map integration components is that SD map encoders are model agnostic and can be quickly adapted to new architectures that utilize bird's eye view (BEV) encoders. Our results show that making use of SD maps as priors for the online mapping task can significantly speed up convergence and boost the performance of the online centerline perception task by 30% (mAP). Furthermore, we show that the introduction of the SD maps leads to a reduction of the number of parameters in the perception and reasoning task by leveraging SD map graphs while improving the overall performance. Project Page: https://henryzhangzhy.github.io/sdhdmap/.
Split Matching for Inductive Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation
Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation (ZSS) aims to segment categories that are not annotated during training. While fine-tuning vision-language models has achieved promising results, these models often overfit to seen categories due to the lack of supervision for unseen classes. As an alternative to fully supervised approaches, query-based segmentation has shown great latent in ZSS, as it enables object localization without relying on explicit labels. However, conventional Hungarian matching, a core component in query-based frameworks, needs full supervision and often misclassifies unseen categories as background in the setting of ZSS. To address this issue, we propose Split Matching (SM), a novel assignment strategy that decouples Hungarian matching into two components: one for seen classes in annotated regions and another for latent classes in unannotated regions (referred to as unseen candidates). Specifically, we partition the queries into seen and candidate groups, enabling each to be optimized independently according to its available supervision. To discover unseen candidates, we cluster CLIP dense features to generate pseudo masks and extract region-level embeddings using CLS tokens. Matching is then conducted separately for the two groups based on both class-level similarity and mask-level consistency. Additionally, we introduce a Multi-scale Feature Enhancement (MFE) module that refines decoder features through residual multi-scale aggregation, improving the model's ability to capture spatial details across resolutions. SM is the first to introduce decoupled Hungarian matching under the inductive ZSS setting, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two standard benchmarks.
FiTv2: Scalable and Improved Flexible Vision Transformer for Diffusion Model
Nature is infinitely resolution-free. In the context of this reality, existing diffusion models, such as Diffusion Transformers, often face challenges when processing image resolutions outside of their trained domain. To address this limitation, we conceptualize images as sequences of tokens with dynamic sizes, rather than traditional methods that perceive images as fixed-resolution grids. This perspective enables a flexible training strategy that seamlessly accommodates various aspect ratios during both training and inference, thus promoting resolution generalization and eliminating biases introduced by image cropping. On this basis, we present the Flexible Vision Transformer (FiT), a transformer architecture specifically designed for generating images with unrestricted resolutions and aspect ratios. We further upgrade the FiT to FiTv2 with several innovative designs, includingthe Query-Key vector normalization, the AdaLN-LoRA module, a rectified flow scheduler, and a Logit-Normal sampler. Enhanced by a meticulously adjusted network structure, FiTv2 exhibits 2times convergence speed of FiT. When incorporating advanced training-free extrapolation techniques, FiTv2 demonstrates remarkable adaptability in both resolution extrapolation and diverse resolution generation. Additionally, our exploration of the scalability of the FiTv2 model reveals that larger models exhibit better computational efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient post-training strategy to adapt a pre-trained model for the high-resolution generation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the exceptional performance of FiTv2 across a broad range of resolutions. We have released all the codes and models at https://github.com/whlzy/FiT to promote the exploration of diffusion transformer models for arbitrary-resolution image generation.
LowDiff: Efficient Diffusion Sampling with Low-Resolution Condition
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image generation but their practical application is often hindered by the slow sampling speed. Prior efforts of improving efficiency primarily focus on compressing models or reducing the total number of denoising steps, largely neglecting the possibility to leverage multiple input resolutions in the generation process. In this work, we propose LowDiff, a novel and efficient diffusion framework based on a cascaded approach by generating increasingly higher resolution outputs. Besides, LowDiff employs a unified model to progressively refine images from low resolution to the desired resolution. With the proposed architecture design and generation techniques, we achieve comparable or even superior performance with much fewer high-resolution sampling steps. LowDiff is applicable to diffusion models in both pixel space and latent space. Extensive experiments on both conditional and unconditional generation tasks across CIFAR-10, FFHQ and ImageNet demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our method. Results show over 50% throughput improvement across all datasets and settings while maintaining comparable or better quality. On unconditional CIFAR-10, LowDiff achieves an FID of 2.11 and IS of 9.87, while on conditional CIFAR-10, an FID of 1.94 and IS of 10.03. On FFHQ 64x64, LowDiff achieves an FID of 2.43, and on ImageNet 256x256, LowDiff built on LightningDiT-B/1 produces high-quality samples with a FID of 4.00 and an IS of 195.06, together with substantial efficiency gains.
XFeat: Accelerated Features for Lightweight Image Matching
We introduce a lightweight and accurate architecture for resource-efficient visual correspondence. Our method, dubbed XFeat (Accelerated Features), revisits fundamental design choices in convolutional neural networks for detecting, extracting, and matching local features. Our new model satisfies a critical need for fast and robust algorithms suitable to resource-limited devices. In particular, accurate image matching requires sufficiently large image resolutions - for this reason, we keep the resolution as large as possible while limiting the number of channels in the network. Besides, our model is designed to offer the choice of matching at the sparse or semi-dense levels, each of which may be more suitable for different downstream applications, such as visual navigation and augmented reality. Our model is the first to offer semi-dense matching efficiently, leveraging a novel match refinement module that relies on coarse local descriptors. XFeat is versatile and hardware-independent, surpassing current deep learning-based local features in speed (up to 5x faster) with comparable or better accuracy, proven in pose estimation and visual localization. We showcase it running in real-time on an inexpensive laptop CPU without specialized hardware optimizations. Code and weights are available at www.verlab.dcc.ufmg.br/descriptors/xfeat_cvpr24.
Decoupling Fine Detail and Global Geometry for Compressed Depth Map Super-Resolution
Recovering high-quality depth maps from compressed sources has gained significant attention due to the limitations of consumer-grade depth cameras and the bandwidth restrictions during data transmission. However, current methods still suffer from two challenges. First, bit-depth compression produces a uniform depth representation in regions with subtle variations, hindering the recovery of detailed information. Second, densely distributed random noise reduces the accuracy of estimating the global geometric structure of the scene. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, termed geometry-decoupled network (GDNet), for compressed depth map super-resolution that decouples the high-quality depth map reconstruction process by handling global and detailed geometric features separately. To be specific, we propose the fine geometry detail encoder (FGDE), which is designed to aggregate fine geometry details in high-resolution low-level image features while simultaneously enriching them with complementary information from low-resolution context-level image features. In addition, we develop the global geometry encoder (GGE) that aims at suppressing noise and extracting global geometric information effectively via constructing compact feature representation in a low-rank space. We conduct experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating that our GDNet significantly outperforms current methods in terms of geometric consistency and detail recovery. In the ECCV 2024 AIM Compressed Depth Upsampling Challenge, our solution won the 1st place award. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/Ian0926/GDNet.
DiffuMatch: Category-Agnostic Spectral Diffusion Priors for Robust Non-rigid Shape Matching
Deep functional maps have recently emerged as a powerful tool for solving non-rigid shape correspondence tasks. Methods that use this approach combine the power and flexibility of the functional map framework, with data-driven learning for improved accuracy and generality. However, most existing methods in this area restrict the learning aspect only to the feature functions and still rely on axiomatic modeling for formulating the training loss or for functional map regularization inside the networks. This limits both the accuracy and the applicability of the resulting approaches only to scenarios where assumptions of the axiomatic models hold. In this work, we show, for the first time, that both in-network regularization and functional map training can be replaced with data-driven methods. For this, we first train a generative model of functional maps in the spectral domain using score-based generative modeling, built from a large collection of high-quality maps. We then exploit the resulting model to promote the structural properties of ground truth functional maps on new shape collections. Remarkably, we demonstrate that the learned models are category-agnostic, and can fully replace commonly used strategies such as enforcing Laplacian commutativity or orthogonality of functional maps. Our key technical contribution is a novel distillation strategy from diffusion models in the spectral domain. Experiments demonstrate that our learned regularization leads to better results than axiomatic approaches for zero-shot non-rigid shape matching. Our code is available at: https://github.com/daidedou/diffumatch/
Pansharpening by convolutional neural networks in the full resolution framework
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in deep learning-based pansharpening. Thus far, research has mainly focused on architectures. Nonetheless, model training is an equally important issue. A first problem is the absence of ground truths, unavoidable in pansharpening. This is often addressed by training networks in a reduced resolution domain and using the original data as ground truth, relying on an implicit scale invariance assumption. However, on full resolution images results are often disappointing, suggesting such invariance not to hold. A further problem is the scarcity of training data, which causes a limited generalization ability and a poor performance on off-training test images. In this paper, we propose a full-resolution training framework for deep learning-based pansharpening. The framework is fully general and can be used for any deep learning-based pansharpening model. Training takes place in the high-resolution domain, relying only on the original data, thus avoiding any loss of information. To ensure spectral and spatial fidelity, a suitable two-component loss is defined. The spectral component enforces consistency between the pansharpened output and the low-resolution multispectral input. The spatial component, computed at high-resolution, maximizes the local correlation between each pansharpened band and the panchromatic input. At testing time, the target-adaptive operating modality is adopted, achieving good generalization with a limited computational overhead. Experiments carried out on WorldView-3, WorldView-2, and GeoEye-1 images show that methods trained with the proposed framework guarantee a pretty good performance in terms of both full-resolution numerical indexes and visual quality.
AnyUp: Universal Feature Upsampling
We introduce AnyUp, a method for feature upsampling that can be applied to any vision feature at any resolution, without encoder-specific training. Existing learning-based upsamplers for features like DINO or CLIP need to be re-trained for every feature extractor and thus do not generalize to different feature types at inference time. In this work, we propose an inference-time feature-agnostic upsampling architecture to alleviate this limitation and improve upsampling quality. In our experiments, AnyUp sets a new state of the art for upsampled features, generalizes to different feature types, and preserves feature semantics while being efficient and easy to apply to a wide range of downstream tasks.
LandCover.ai: Dataset for Automatic Mapping of Buildings, Woodlands, Water and Roads from Aerial Imagery
Monitoring of land cover and land use is crucial in natural resources management. Automatic visual mapping can carry enormous economic value for agriculture, forestry, or public administration. Satellite or aerial images combined with computer vision and deep learning enable precise assessment and can significantly speed up change detection. Aerial imagery usually provides images with much higher pixel resolution than satellite data allowing more detailed mapping. However, there is still a lack of aerial datasets made for the segmentation, covering rural areas with a resolution of tens centimeters per pixel, manual fine labels, and highly publicly important environmental instances like buildings, woods, water, or roads. Here we introduce LandCover.ai (Land Cover from Aerial Imagery) dataset for semantic segmentation. We collected images of 216.27 sq. km rural areas across Poland, a country in Central Europe, 39.51 sq. km with resolution 50 cm per pixel and 176.76 sq. km with resolution 25 cm per pixel and manually fine annotated four following classes of objects: buildings, woodlands, water, and roads. Additionally, we report simple benchmark results, achieving 85.56% of mean intersection over union on the test set. It proves that the automatic mapping of land cover is possible with a relatively small, cost-efficient, RGB-only dataset. The dataset is publicly available at https://landcover.ai.linuxpolska.com/
Dense Pixel-to-Pixel Harmonization via Continuous Image Representation
High-resolution (HR) image harmonization is of great significance in real-world applications such as image synthesis and image editing. However, due to the high memory costs, existing dense pixel-to-pixel harmonization methods are mainly focusing on processing low-resolution (LR) images. Some recent works resort to combining with color-to-color transformations but are either limited to certain resolutions or heavily depend on hand-crafted image filters. In this work, we explore leveraging the implicit neural representation (INR) and propose a novel image Harmonization method based on Implicit neural Networks (HINet), which to the best of our knowledge, is the first dense pixel-to-pixel method applicable to HR images without any hand-crafted filter design. Inspired by the Retinex theory, we decouple the MLPs into two parts to respectively capture the content and environment of composite images. A Low-Resolution Image Prior (LRIP) network is designed to alleviate the Boundary Inconsistency problem, and we also propose new designs for the training and inference process. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, some interesting and practical applications of the proposed method are explored. Our code will be available at https://github.com/WindVChen/INR-Harmonization.
Multi-Scale VMamba: Hierarchy in Hierarchy Visual State Space Model
Despite the significant achievements of Vision Transformers (ViTs) in various vision tasks, they are constrained by the quadratic complexity. Recently, State Space Models (SSMs) have garnered widespread attention due to their global receptive field and linear complexity with respect to the input length, demonstrating substantial potential across fields including natural language processing and computer vision. To improve the performance of SSMs in vision tasks, a multi-scan strategy is widely adopted, which leads to significant redundancy of SSMs. For a better trade-off between efficiency and performance, we analyze the underlying reasons behind the success of the multi-scan strategy, where long-range dependency plays an important role. Based on the analysis, we introduce Multi-Scale Vision Mamba (MSVMamba) to preserve the superiority of SSMs in vision tasks with limited parameters. It employs a multi-scale 2D scanning technique on both original and downsampled feature maps, which not only benefits long-range dependency learning but also reduces computational costs. Additionally, we integrate a Convolutional Feed-Forward Network (ConvFFN) to address the lack of channel mixing. Our experiments demonstrate that MSVMamba is highly competitive, with the MSVMamba-Tiny model achieving 82.8% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, 46.9% box mAP, and 42.2% instance mAP with the Mask R-CNN framework, 1x training schedule on COCO, and 47.6% mIoU with single-scale testing on ADE20K.Code is available at https://github.com/YuHengsss/MSVMamba.
OAM-TCD: A globally diverse dataset of high-resolution tree cover maps
Accurately quantifying tree cover is an important metric for ecosystem monitoring and for assessing progress in restored sites. Recent works have shown that deep learning-based segmentation algorithms are capable of accurately mapping trees at country and continental scales using high-resolution aerial and satellite imagery. Mapping at high (ideally sub-meter) resolution is necessary to identify individual trees, however there are few open-access datasets containing instance level annotations and those that exist are small or not geographically diverse. We present a novel open-access dataset for individual tree crown delineation (TCD) in high-resolution aerial imagery sourced from OpenAerialMap (OAM). Our dataset, OAM-TCD, comprises 5072 2048x2048 px images at 10 cm/px resolution with associated human-labeled instance masks for over 280k individual and 56k groups of trees. By sampling imagery from around the world, we are able to better capture the diversity and morphology of trees in different terrestrial biomes and in both urban and natural environments. Using our dataset, we train reference instance and semantic segmentation models that compare favorably to existing state-of-the-art models. We assess performance through k-fold cross-validation and comparison with existing datasets; additionally we demonstrate compelling results on independent aerial imagery captured over Switzerland and compare to municipal tree inventories and LIDAR-derived canopy maps in the city of Zurich. Our dataset, models and training/benchmark code are publicly released under permissive open-source licenses: Creative Commons (majority CC BY 4.0), and Apache 2.0 respectively.
DETR Doesn't Need Multi-Scale or Locality Design
This paper presents an improved DETR detector that maintains a "plain" nature: using a single-scale feature map and global cross-attention calculations without specific locality constraints, in contrast to previous leading DETR-based detectors that reintroduce architectural inductive biases of multi-scale and locality into the decoder. We show that two simple technologies are surprisingly effective within a plain design to compensate for the lack of multi-scale feature maps and locality constraints. The first is a box-to-pixel relative position bias (BoxRPB) term added to the cross-attention formulation, which well guides each query to attend to the corresponding object region while also providing encoding flexibility. The second is masked image modeling (MIM)-based backbone pre-training which helps learn representation with fine-grained localization ability and proves crucial for remedying dependencies on the multi-scale feature maps. By incorporating these technologies and recent advancements in training and problem formation, the improved "plain" DETR showed exceptional improvements over the original DETR detector. By leveraging the Object365 dataset for pre-training, it achieved 63.9 mAP accuracy using a Swin-L backbone, which is highly competitive with state-of-the-art detectors which all heavily rely on multi-scale feature maps and region-based feature extraction. Code is available at https://github.com/impiga/Plain-DETR .
MMFuser: Multimodal Multi-Layer Feature Fuser for Fine-Grained Vision-Language Understanding
Despite significant advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for understanding complex human intentions through cross-modal interactions, capturing intricate image details remains challenging. Previous methods integrating multiple vision encoders to enhance visual detail introduce redundancy and computational overhead. We observe that most MLLMs utilize only the last-layer feature map of the vision encoder for visual representation, neglecting the rich fine-grained information in shallow feature maps. To address this issue, we propose \modelname, a simple yet effective multi-layer feature fuser that efficiently integrates deep and shallow features from Vision Transformers (ViTs). Specifically, it leverages semantically aligned deep features as queries to dynamically extract missing details from shallow features, thus preserving semantic alignment while enriching the representation with fine-grained information. Applied to the LLaVA-1.5 model, \modelname~achieves significant improvements in visual representation and benchmark performance, providing a more flexible and lightweight solution compared to multi-encoder ensemble methods. The code and model have been released at https://github.com/yuecao0119/MMFuser.
Revisiting Depth Representations for Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting
Depth maps are widely used in feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) pipelines by unprojecting them into 3D point clouds for novel view synthesis. This approach offers advantages such as efficient training, the use of known camera poses, and accurate geometry estimation. However, depth discontinuities at object boundaries often lead to fragmented or sparse point clouds, degrading rendering quality -- a well-known limitation of depth-based representations. To tackle this issue, we introduce PM-Loss, a novel regularization loss based on a pointmap predicted by a pre-trained transformer. Although the pointmap itself may be less accurate than the depth map, it effectively enforces geometric smoothness, especially around object boundaries. With the improved depth map, our method significantly improves the feed-forward 3DGS across various architectures and scenes, delivering consistently better rendering results. Our project page: https://aim-uofa.github.io/PMLoss
Delineate Anything: Resolution-Agnostic Field Boundary Delineation on Satellite Imagery
The accurate delineation of agricultural field boundaries from satellite imagery is vital for land management and crop monitoring. However, current methods face challenges due to limited dataset sizes, resolution discrepancies, and diverse environmental conditions. We address this by reformulating the task as instance segmentation and introducing the Field Boundary Instance Segmentation - 22M dataset (FBIS-22M), a large-scale, multi-resolution dataset comprising 672,909 high-resolution satellite image patches (ranging from 0.25 m to 10 m) and 22,926,427 instance masks of individual fields, significantly narrowing the gap between agricultural datasets and those in other computer vision domains. We further propose Delineate Anything, an instance segmentation model trained on our new FBIS-22M dataset. Our proposed model sets a new state-of-the-art, achieving a substantial improvement of 88.5% in [email protected] and 103% in [email protected]:0.95 over existing methods, while also demonstrating significantly faster inference and strong zero-shot generalization across diverse image resolutions and unseen geographic regions. Code, pre-trained models, and the FBIS-22M dataset are available at https://lavreniuk.github.io/Delineate-Anything.
An Object is Worth 64x64 Pixels: Generating 3D Object via Image Diffusion
We introduce a new approach for generating realistic 3D models with UV maps through a representation termed "Object Images." This approach encapsulates surface geometry, appearance, and patch structures within a 64x64 pixel image, effectively converting complex 3D shapes into a more manageable 2D format. By doing so, we address the challenges of both geometric and semantic irregularity inherent in polygonal meshes. This method allows us to use image generation models, such as Diffusion Transformers, directly for 3D shape generation. Evaluated on the ABO dataset, our generated shapes with patch structures achieve point cloud FID comparable to recent 3D generative models, while naturally supporting PBR material generation.
LIST: Learning Implicitly from Spatial Transformers for Single-View 3D Reconstruction
Accurate reconstruction of both the geometric and topological details of a 3D object from a single 2D image embodies a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing explicit/implicit solutions to this problem struggle to recover self-occluded geometry and/or faithfully reconstruct topological shape structures. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce LIST, a novel neural architecture that leverages local and global image features to accurately reconstruct the geometric and topological structure of a 3D object from a single image. We utilize global 2D features to predict a coarse shape of the target object and then use it as a base for higher-resolution reconstruction. By leveraging both local 2D features from the image and 3D features from the coarse prediction, we can predict the signed distance between an arbitrary point and the target surface via an implicit predictor with great accuracy. Furthermore, our model does not require camera estimation or pixel alignment. It provides an uninfluenced reconstruction from the input-view direction. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, we show the superiority of our model in reconstructing 3D objects from both synthetic and real-world images against the state of the art.
Harnessing Massive Satellite Imagery with Efficient Masked Image Modeling
Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has become an essential method for building foundational visual models in remote sensing (RS). However, the limitations in size and diversity of existing RS datasets restrict the ability of MIM methods to learn generalizable representations. Additionally, conventional MIM techniques, which require reconstructing all tokens, introduce unnecessary computational overhead. To address these issues, we present a new pre-training pipeline for RS models, featuring the creation of a large-scale RS dataset and an efficient MIM approach. We curated a high-quality dataset named OpticalRS-13M by collecting publicly available RS datasets and processing them through exclusion, slicing, and deduplication. OpticalRS-13M comprises 13 million optical images covering various RS tasks, such as object detection and pixel segmentation. To enhance efficiency, we propose SelectiveMAE, a pre-training method that dynamically encodes and reconstructs semantically rich patch tokens, thereby reducing the inefficiencies of traditional MIM models caused by redundant background pixels in RS images. Extensive experiments show that OpticalRS-13M significantly improves classification, detection, and segmentation performance, while SelectiveMAE increases training efficiency over 2times times. This highlights the effectiveness and scalability of our pipeline in developing RS foundational models. The dataset, source code, and trained models will be released at https://github.com/MiliLab/SelectiveMAE.
Lightweight Image Super-Resolution with Information Multi-distillation Network
In recent years, single image super-resolution (SISR) methods using deep convolution neural network (CNN) have achieved impressive results. Thanks to the powerful representation capabilities of the deep networks, numerous previous ways can learn the complex non-linear mapping between low-resolution (LR) image patches and their high-resolution (HR) versions. However, excessive convolutions will limit the application of super-resolution technology in low computing power devices. Besides, super-resolution of any arbitrary scale factor is a critical issue in practical applications, which has not been well solved in the previous approaches. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight information multi-distillation network (IMDN) by constructing the cascaded information multi-distillation blocks (IMDB), which contains distillation and selective fusion parts. Specifically, the distillation module extracts hierarchical features step-by-step, and fusion module aggregates them according to the importance of candidate features, which is evaluated by the proposed contrast-aware channel attention mechanism. To process real images with any sizes, we develop an adaptive cropping strategy (ACS) to super-resolve block-wise image patches using the same well-trained model. Extensive experiments suggest that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art SR algorithms in term of visual quality, memory footprint, and inference time. Code is available at https://github.com/Zheng222/IMDN.
Global Spatial-Temporal Information-based Residual ConvLSTM for Video Space-Time Super-Resolution
By converting low-frame-rate, low-resolution videos into high-frame-rate, high-resolution ones, space-time video super-resolution techniques can enhance visual experiences and facilitate more efficient information dissemination. We propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) for space-time video super-resolution, namely GIRNet. To generate highly accurate features and thus improve performance, the proposed network integrates a feature-level temporal interpolation module with deformable convolutions and a global spatial-temporal information-based residual convolutional long short-term memory (convLSTM) module. In the feature-level temporal interpolation module, we leverage deformable convolution, which adapts to deformations and scale variations of objects across different scene locations. This presents a more efficient solution than conventional convolution for extracting features from moving objects. Our network effectively uses forward and backward feature information to determine inter-frame offsets, leading to the direct generation of interpolated frame features. In the global spatial-temporal information-based residual convLSTM module, the first convLSTM is used to derive global spatial-temporal information from the input features, and the second convLSTM uses the previously computed global spatial-temporal information feature as its initial cell state. This second convLSTM adopts residual connections to preserve spatial information, thereby enhancing the output features. Experiments on the Vimeo90K dataset show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in peak signal-to-noise-ratio (by 1.45 dB, 1.14 dB, and 0.02 dB over STARnet, TMNet, and 3DAttGAN, respectively), structural similarity index(by 0.027, 0.023, and 0.006 over STARnet, TMNet, and 3DAttGAN, respectively), and visually.
Self-Calibrating Gaussian Splatting for Large Field of View Reconstruction
In this paper, we present a self-calibrating framework that jointly optimizes camera parameters, lens distortion and 3D Gaussian representations, enabling accurate and efficient scene reconstruction. In particular, our technique enables high-quality scene reconstruction from Large field-of-view (FOV) imagery taken with wide-angle lenses, allowing the scene to be modeled from a smaller number of images. Our approach introduces a novel method for modeling complex lens distortions using a hybrid network that combines invertible residual networks with explicit grids. This design effectively regularizes the optimization process, achieving greater accuracy than conventional camera models. Additionally, we propose a cubemap-based resampling strategy to support large FOV images without sacrificing resolution or introducing distortion artifacts. Our method is compatible with the fast rasterization of Gaussian Splatting, adaptable to a wide variety of camera lens distortion, and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Spatial Frequency Modulation for Semantic Segmentation
High spatial frequency information, including fine details like textures, significantly contributes to the accuracy of semantic segmentation. However, according to the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem, high-frequency components are vulnerable to aliasing or distortion when propagating through downsampling layers such as strided-convolution. Here, we propose a novel Spatial Frequency Modulation (SFM) that modulates high-frequency features to a lower frequency before downsampling and then demodulates them back during upsampling. Specifically, we implement modulation through adaptive resampling (ARS) and design a lightweight add-on that can densely sample the high-frequency areas to scale up the signal, thereby lowering its frequency in accordance with the Frequency Scaling Property. We also propose Multi-Scale Adaptive Upsampling (MSAU) to demodulate the modulated feature and recover high-frequency information through non-uniform upsampling This module further improves segmentation by explicitly exploiting information interaction between densely and sparsely resampled areas at multiple scales. Both modules can seamlessly integrate with various architectures, extending from convolutional neural networks to transformers. Feature visualization and analysis confirm that our method effectively alleviates aliasing while successfully retaining details after demodulation. Finally, we validate the broad applicability and effectiveness of SFM by extending it to image classification, adversarial robustness, instance segmentation, and panoptic segmentation tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/SFM.
Defurnishing with X-Ray Vision: Joint Removal of Furniture from Panoramas and Mesh
We present a pipeline for generating defurnished replicas of indoor spaces represented as textured meshes and corresponding multi-view panoramic images. To achieve this, we first segment and remove furniture from the mesh representation, extend planes, and fill holes, obtaining a simplified defurnished mesh (SDM). This SDM acts as an ``X-ray'' of the scene's underlying structure, guiding the defurnishing process. We extract Canny edges from depth and normal images rendered from the SDM. We then use these as a guide to remove the furniture from panorama images via ControlNet inpainting. This control signal ensures the availability of global geometric information that may be hidden from a particular panoramic view by the furniture being removed. The inpainted panoramas are used to texture the mesh. We show that our approach produces higher quality assets than methods that rely on neural radiance fields, which tend to produce blurry low-resolution images, or RGB-D inpainting, which is highly susceptible to hallucinations.
MSPE: Multi-Scale Patch Embedding Prompts Vision Transformers to Any Resolution
Although Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently advanced computer vision tasks significantly, an important real-world problem was overlooked: adapting to variable input resolutions. Typically, images are resized to a fixed resolution, such as 224x224, for efficiency during training and inference. However, uniform input size conflicts with real-world scenarios where images naturally vary in resolution. Modifying the preset resolution of a model may severely degrade the performance. In this work, we propose to enhance the model adaptability to resolution variation by optimizing the patch embedding. The proposed method, called Multi-Scale Patch Embedding (MSPE), substitutes the standard patch embedding with multiple variable-sized patch kernels and selects the best parameters for different resolutions, eliminating the need to resize the original image. Our method does not require high-cost training or modifications to other parts, making it easy to apply to most ViT models. Experiments in image classification, segmentation, and detection tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of MSPE, yielding superior performance on low-resolution inputs and performing comparably on high-resolution inputs with existing methods.
RegionBLIP: A Unified Multi-modal Pre-training Framework for Holistic and Regional Comprehension
In this work, we investigate extending the comprehension of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to regional objects. To this end, we propose to extract features corresponding to regional objects as soft prompts for LLM, which provides a straightforward and scalable approach and eliminates the need for LLM fine-tuning. To effectively extract regional features from regular image features and irregular point cloud features, we present a novel and unified position-assisted feature extraction module. Furthermore, training an MLLM from scratch is highly time-consuming. Thus, we propose incrementally extending existing pre-trained MLLMs to comprehend more modalities and the regional objects of those modalities. Specifically, we freeze the Q-Former from BLIP-2, an impressive MLLM, and optimize the modality-specific Lora parameters in Q-Former and LLM for each newly introduced modality. The freezing of the Q-Former eliminates the need for extensive pre-training on massive image-text data. The freezed Q-Former pre-trained from massive image-text data is also beneficial for the pre-training on image-region-text data. We name our framework RegionBLIP. We pre-train RegionBLIP on image-region-text, point-cloud-text, and point-cloud-region-text data. Experimental results verify that can preserve the image comprehension capability of BILP-2 and further gain a comprehension of the newly introduced point cloud modality and regional objects. The Data, Code, and Pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/mightyzau/RegionBLIP.
SHIC: Shape-Image Correspondences with no Keypoint Supervision
Canonical surface mapping generalizes keypoint detection by assigning each pixel of an object to a corresponding point in a 3D template. Popularised by DensePose for the analysis of humans, authors have since attempted to apply the concept to more categories, but with limited success due to the high cost of manual supervision. In this work, we introduce SHIC, a method to learn canonical maps without manual supervision which achieves better results than supervised methods for most categories. Our idea is to leverage foundation computer vision models such as DINO and Stable Diffusion that are open-ended and thus possess excellent priors over natural categories. SHIC reduces the problem of estimating image-to-template correspondences to predicting image-to-image correspondences using features from the foundation models. The reduction works by matching images of the object to non-photorealistic renders of the template, which emulates the process of collecting manual annotations for this task. These correspondences are then used to supervise high-quality canonical maps for any object of interest. We also show that image generators can further improve the realism of the template views, which provide an additional source of supervision for the model.
Global and Dense Embeddings of Earth: Major TOM Floating in the Latent Space
With the ever-increasing volumes of the Earth observation data present in the archives of large programmes such as Copernicus, there is a growing need for efficient vector representations of the underlying raw data. The approach of extracting feature representations from pretrained deep neural networks is a powerful approach that can provide semantic abstractions of the input data. However, the way this is done for imagery archives containing geospatial data has not yet been defined. In this work, an extension is proposed to an existing community project, Major TOM, focused on the provision and standardization of open and free AI-ready datasets for Earth observation. Furthermore, four global and dense embedding datasets are released openly and for free along with the publication of this manuscript, resulting in the most comprehensive global open dataset of geospatial visual embeddings in terms of covered Earth's surface.
Generalizable Entity Grounding via Assistance of Large Language Model
In this work, we propose a novel approach to densely ground visual entities from a long caption. We leverage a large multimodal model (LMM) to extract semantic nouns, a class-agnostic segmentation model to generate entity-level segmentation, and the proposed multi-modal feature fusion module to associate each semantic noun with its corresponding segmentation mask. Additionally, we introduce a strategy of encoding entity segmentation masks into a colormap, enabling the preservation of fine-grained predictions from features of high-resolution masks. This approach allows us to extract visual features from low-resolution images using the CLIP vision encoder in the LMM, which is more computationally efficient than existing approaches that use an additional encoder for high-resolution images. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method, outperforming state-of-the-art techniques on three tasks, including panoptic narrative grounding, referring expression segmentation, and panoptic segmentation.
Depth-Regularized Optimization for 3D Gaussian Splatting in Few-Shot Images
In this paper, we present a method to optimize Gaussian splatting with a limited number of images while avoiding overfitting. Representing a 3D scene by combining numerous Gaussian splats has yielded outstanding visual quality. However, it tends to overfit the training views when only a small number of images are available. To address this issue, we introduce a dense depth map as a geometry guide to mitigate overfitting. We obtained the depth map using a pre-trained monocular depth estimation model and aligning the scale and offset using sparse COLMAP feature points. The adjusted depth aids in the color-based optimization of 3D Gaussian splatting, mitigating floating artifacts, and ensuring adherence to geometric constraints. We verify the proposed method on the NeRF-LLFF dataset with varying numbers of few images. Our approach demonstrates robust geometry compared to the original method that relies solely on images. Project page: robot0321.github.io/DepthRegGS
Mask2Map: Vectorized HD Map Construction Using Bird's Eye View Segmentation Masks
In this paper, we introduce Mask2Map, a novel end-to-end online HD map construction method designed for autonomous driving applications. Our approach focuses on predicting the class and ordered point set of map instances within a scene, represented in the bird's eye view (BEV). Mask2Map consists of two primary components: the Instance-Level Mask Prediction Network (IMPNet) and the Mask-Driven Map Prediction Network (MMPNet). IMPNet generates Mask-Aware Queries and BEV Segmentation Masks to capture comprehensive semantic information globally. Subsequently, MMPNet enhances these query features using local contextual information through two submodules: the Positional Query Generator (PQG) and the Geometric Feature Extractor (GFE). PQG extracts instance-level positional queries by embedding BEV positional information into Mask-Aware Queries, while GFE utilizes BEV Segmentation Masks to generate point-level geometric features. However, we observed limited performance in Mask2Map due to inter-network inconsistency stemming from different predictions to Ground Truth (GT) matching between IMPNet and MMPNet. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Inter-network Denoising Training method, which guides the model to denoise the output affected by both noisy GT queries and perturbed GT Segmentation Masks. Our evaluation conducted on nuScenes and Argoverse2 benchmarks demonstrates that Mask2Map achieves remarkable performance improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods, with gains of 10.1% mAP and 4.1 mAP, respectively. Our code can be found at https://github.com/SehwanChoi0307/Mask2Map.
Toward Advancing License Plate Super-Resolution in Real-World Scenarios: A Dataset and Benchmark
Recent advancements in super-resolution for License Plate Recognition (LPR) have sought to address challenges posed by low-resolution (LR) and degraded images in surveillance, traffic monitoring, and forensic applications. However, existing studies have relied on private datasets and simplistic degradation models. To address this gap, we introduce UFPR-SR-Plates, a novel dataset containing 10,000 tracks with 100,000 paired low and high-resolution license plate images captured under real-world conditions. We establish a benchmark using multiple sequential LR and high-resolution (HR) images per vehicle -- five of each -- and two state-of-the-art models for super-resolution of license plates. We also investigate three fusion strategies to evaluate how combining predictions from a leading Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model for multiple super-resolved license plates enhances overall performance. Our findings demonstrate that super-resolution significantly boosts LPR performance, with further improvements observed when applying majority vote-based fusion techniques. Specifically, the Layout-Aware and Character-Driven Network (LCDNet) model combined with the Majority Vote by Character Position (MVCP) strategy led to the highest recognition rates, increasing from 1.7% with low-resolution images to 31.1% with super-resolution, and up to 44.7% when combining OCR outputs from five super-resolved images. These findings underscore the critical role of super-resolution and temporal information in enhancing LPR accuracy under real-world, adverse conditions. The proposed dataset is publicly available to support further research and can be accessed at: https://valfride.github.io/nascimento2024toward/
Parallax-Tolerant Unsupervised Deep Image Stitching
Traditional image stitching approaches tend to leverage increasingly complex geometric features (point, line, edge, etc.) for better performance. However, these hand-crafted features are only suitable for specific natural scenes with adequate geometric structures. In contrast, deep stitching schemes overcome the adverse conditions by adaptively learning robust semantic features, but they cannot handle large-parallax cases due to homography-based registration. To solve these issues, we propose UDIS++, a parallax-tolerant unsupervised deep image stitching technique. First, we propose a robust and flexible warp to model the image registration from global homography to local thin-plate spline motion. It provides accurate alignment for overlapping regions and shape preservation for non-overlapping regions by joint optimization concerning alignment and distortion. Subsequently, to improve the generalization capability, we design a simple but effective iterative strategy to enhance the warp adaption in cross-dataset and cross-resolution applications. Finally, to further eliminate the parallax artifacts, we propose to composite the stitched image seamlessly by unsupervised learning for seam-driven composition masks. Compared with existing methods, our solution is parallax-tolerant and free from laborious designs of complicated geometric features for specific scenes. Extensive experiments show our superiority over the SoTA methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The code is available at https://github.com/nie-lang/UDIS2.
AdaptVision: Dynamic Input Scaling in MLLMs for Versatile Scene Understanding
Over the past few years, the advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has captured the wide interest of researchers, leading to numerous innovations to enhance MLLMs' comprehension. In this paper, we present AdaptVision, a multimodal large language model specifically designed to dynamically process input images at varying resolutions. We hypothesize that the requisite number of visual tokens for the model is contingent upon both the resolution and content of the input image. Generally, natural images with a lower information density can be effectively interpreted by the model using fewer visual tokens at reduced resolutions. In contrast, images containing textual content, such as documents with rich text, necessitate a higher number of visual tokens for accurate text interpretation due to their higher information density. Building on this insight, we devise a dynamic image partitioning module that adjusts the number of visual tokens according to the size and aspect ratio of images. This method mitigates distortion effects that arise from resizing images to a uniform resolution and dynamically optimizing the visual tokens input to the LLMs. Our model is capable of processing images with resolutions up to 1008times 1008. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate that our method achieves impressive performance in handling vision-language tasks in both natural and text-related scenes. The source code and dataset are now publicly available at https://github.com/harrytea/AdaptVision.
Super-resolution of Sentinel-2 images: Learning a globally applicable deep neural network
The Sentinel-2 satellite mission delivers multi-spectral imagery with 13 spectral bands, acquired at three different spatial resolutions. The aim of this research is to super-resolve the lower-resolution (20 m and 60 m Ground Sampling Distance - GSD) bands to 10 m GSD, so as to obtain a complete data cube at the maximal sensor resolution. We employ a state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform end-to-end upsampling, which is trained with data at lower resolution, i.e., from 40->20 m, respectively 360->60 m GSD. In this way, one has access to a virtually infinite amount of training data, by downsampling real Sentinel-2 images. We use data sampled globally over a wide range of geographical locations, to obtain a network that generalises across different climate zones and land-cover types, and can super-resolve arbitrary Sentinel-2 images without the need of retraining. In quantitative evaluations (at lower scale, where ground truth is available), our network, which we call DSen2, outperforms the best competing approach by almost 50% in RMSE, while better preserving the spectral characteristics. It also delivers visually convincing results at the full 10 m GSD. The code is available at https://github.com/lanha/DSen2
ConDL: Detector-Free Dense Image Matching
In this work, we introduce a deep-learning framework designed for estimating dense image correspondences. Our fully convolutional model generates dense feature maps for images, where each pixel is associated with a descriptor that can be matched across multiple images. Unlike previous methods, our model is trained on synthetic data that includes significant distortions, such as perspective changes, illumination variations, shadows, and specular highlights. Utilizing contrastive learning, our feature maps achieve greater invariance to these distortions, enabling robust matching. Notably, our method eliminates the need for a keypoint detector, setting it apart from many existing image-matching techniques.
HF-Diff: High-Frequency Perceptual Loss and Distribution Matching for One-Step Diffusion-Based Image Super-Resolution
Although recent diffusion-based single-step super-resolution methods achieve better performance as compared to SinSR, they are computationally complex. To improve the performance of SinSR, we investigate preserving the high-frequency detail features during super-resolution (SR) because the downgraded images lack detailed information. For this purpose, we introduce a high-frequency perceptual loss by utilizing an invertible neural network (INN) pretrained on the ImageNet dataset. Different feature maps of pretrained INN produce different high-frequency aspects of an image. During the training phase, we impose to preserve the high-frequency features of super-resolved and ground truth (GT) images that improve the SR image quality during inference. Furthermore, we also utilize the Jenson-Shannon divergence between GT and SR images in the pretrained DINO-v2 embedding space to match their distribution. By introducing the high- frequency preserving loss and distribution matching constraint in the single-step diffusion-based SR (HF-Diff), we achieve a state-of-the-art CLIPIQA score in the benchmark RealSR, RealSet65, DIV2K-Val, and ImageNet datasets. Furthermore, the experimental results in several datasets demonstrate that our high-frequency perceptual loss yields better SR image quality than LPIPS and VGG-based perceptual losses. Our code will be released at https://github.com/shoaib-sami/HF-Diff.
Super-resolving Real-world Image Illumination Enhancement: A New Dataset and A Conditional Diffusion Model
Most existing super-resolution methods and datasets have been developed to improve the image quality in well-lighted conditions. However, these methods do not work well in real-world low-light conditions as the images captured in such conditions lose most important information and contain significant unknown noises. To solve this problem, we propose a SRRIIE dataset with an efficient conditional diffusion probabilistic models-based method. The proposed dataset contains 4800 paired low-high quality images. To ensure that the dataset are able to model the real-world image degradation in low-illumination environments, we capture images using an ILDC camera and an optical zoom lens with exposure levels ranging from -6 EV to 0 EV and ISO levels ranging from 50 to 12800. We comprehensively evaluate with various reconstruction and perceptual metrics and demonstrate the practicabilities of the SRRIIE dataset for deep learning-based methods. We show that most existing methods are less effective in preserving the structures and sharpness of restored images from complicated noises. To overcome this problem, we revise the condition for Raw sensor data and propose a novel time-melding condition for diffusion probabilistic model. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experimental results on the real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the feasibility and effectivenesses of the proposed conditional diffusion probabilistic model on Raw sensor data. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/Yaofang-Liu/Super-Resolving
Diffusion Hyperfeatures: Searching Through Time and Space for Semantic Correspondence
Diffusion models have been shown to be capable of generating high-quality images, suggesting that they could contain meaningful internal representations. Unfortunately, the feature maps that encode a diffusion model's internal information are spread not only over layers of the network, but also over diffusion timesteps, making it challenging to extract useful descriptors. We propose Diffusion Hyperfeatures, a framework for consolidating multi-scale and multi-timestep feature maps into per-pixel feature descriptors that can be used for downstream tasks. These descriptors can be extracted for both synthetic and real images using the generation and inversion processes. We evaluate the utility of our Diffusion Hyperfeatures on the task of semantic keypoint correspondence: our method achieves superior performance on the SPair-71k real image benchmark. We also demonstrate that our method is flexible and transferable: our feature aggregation network trained on the inversion features of real image pairs can be used on the generation features of synthetic image pairs with unseen objects and compositions. Our code is available at https://diffusion-hyperfeatures.github.io.
Learning to Zoom and Unzoom
Many perception systems in mobile computing, autonomous navigation, and AR/VR face strict compute constraints that are particularly challenging for high-resolution input images. Previous works propose nonuniform downsamplers that "learn to zoom" on salient image regions, reducing compute while retaining task-relevant image information. However, for tasks with spatial labels (such as 2D/3D object detection and semantic segmentation), such distortions may harm performance. In this work (LZU), we "learn to zoom" in on the input image, compute spatial features, and then "unzoom" to revert any deformations. To enable efficient and differentiable unzooming, we approximate the zooming warp with a piecewise bilinear mapping that is invertible. LZU can be applied to any task with 2D spatial input and any model with 2D spatial features, and we demonstrate this versatility by evaluating on a variety of tasks and datasets: object detection on Argoverse-HD, semantic segmentation on Cityscapes, and monocular 3D object detection on nuScenes. Interestingly, we observe boosts in performance even when high-resolution sensor data is unavailable, implying that LZU can be used to "learn to upsample" as well.
Representing 3D sparse map points and lines for camera relocalization
Recent advancements in visual localization and mapping have demonstrated considerable success in integrating point and line features. However, expanding the localization framework to include additional mapping components frequently results in increased demand for memory and computational resources dedicated to matching tasks. In this study, we show how a lightweight neural network can learn to represent both 3D point and line features, and exhibit leading pose accuracy by harnessing the power of multiple learned mappings. Specifically, we utilize a single transformer block to encode line features, effectively transforming them into distinctive point-like descriptors. Subsequently, we treat these point and line descriptor sets as distinct yet interconnected feature sets. Through the integration of self- and cross-attention within several graph layers, our method effectively refines each feature before regressing 3D maps using two simple MLPs. In comprehensive experiments, our indoor localization findings surpass those of Hloc and Limap across both point-based and line-assisted configurations. Moreover, in outdoor scenarios, our method secures a significant lead, marking the most considerable enhancement over state-of-the-art learning-based methodologies. The source code and demo videos of this work are publicly available at: https://thpjp.github.io/pl2map/
Unsupervised Deep Learning-based Pansharpening with Jointly-Enhanced Spectral and Spatial Fidelity
In latest years, deep learning has gained a leading role in the pansharpening of multiresolution images. Given the lack of ground truth data, most deep learning-based methods carry out supervised training in a reduced-resolution domain. However, models trained on downsized images tend to perform poorly on high-resolution target images. For this reason, several research groups are now turning to unsupervised training in the full-resolution domain, through the definition of appropriate loss functions and training paradigms. In this context, we have recently proposed a full-resolution training framework which can be applied to many existing architectures. Here, we propose a new deep learning-based pansharpening model that fully exploits the potential of this approach and provides cutting-edge performance. Besides architectural improvements with respect to previous work, such as the use of residual attention modules, the proposed model features a novel loss function that jointly promotes the spectral and spatial quality of the pansharpened data. In addition, thanks to a new fine-tuning strategy, it improves inference-time adaptation to target images. Experiments on a large variety of test images, performed in challenging scenarios, demonstrate that the proposed method compares favorably with the state of the art both in terms of numerical results and visual output. Code is available online at https://github.com/matciotola/Lambda-PNN.
PFGS: High Fidelity Point Cloud Rendering via Feature Splatting
Rendering high-fidelity images from sparse point clouds is still challenging. Existing learning-based approaches suffer from either hole artifacts, missing details, or expensive computations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to render high-quality images from sparse points. This method first attempts to bridge the 3D Gaussian Splatting and point cloud rendering, which includes several cascaded modules. We first use a regressor to estimate Gaussian properties in a point-wise manner, the estimated properties are used to rasterize neural feature descriptors into 2D planes which are extracted from a multiscale extractor. The projected feature volume is gradually decoded toward the final prediction via a multiscale and progressive decoder. The whole pipeline experiences a two-stage training and is driven by our well-designed progressive and multiscale reconstruction loss. Experiments on different benchmarks show the superiority of our method in terms of rendering qualities and the necessities of our main components.
Generative Powers of Ten
We present a method that uses a text-to-image model to generate consistent content across multiple image scales, enabling extreme semantic zooms into a scene, e.g., ranging from a wide-angle landscape view of a forest to a macro shot of an insect sitting on one of the tree branches. We achieve this through a joint multi-scale diffusion sampling approach that encourages consistency across different scales while preserving the integrity of each individual sampling process. Since each generated scale is guided by a different text prompt, our method enables deeper levels of zoom than traditional super-resolution methods that may struggle to create new contextual structure at vastly different scales. We compare our method qualitatively with alternative techniques in image super-resolution and outpainting, and show that our method is most effective at generating consistent multi-scale content.
PP-MobileSeg: Explore the Fast and Accurate Semantic Segmentation Model on Mobile Devices
The success of transformers in computer vision has led to several attempts to adapt them for mobile devices, but their performance remains unsatisfactory in some real-world applications. To address this issue, we propose PP-MobileSeg, a semantic segmentation model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on mobile devices. PP-MobileSeg comprises three novel parts: the StrideFormer backbone, the Aggregated Attention Module (AAM), and the Valid Interpolate Module (VIM). The four-stage StrideFormer backbone is built with MV3 blocks and strided SEA attention, and it is able to extract rich semantic and detailed features with minimal parameter overhead. The AAM first filters the detailed features through semantic feature ensemble voting and then combines them with semantic features to enhance the semantic information. Furthermore, we proposed VIM to upsample the downsampled feature to the resolution of the input image. It significantly reduces model latency by only interpolating classes present in the final prediction, which is the most significant contributor to overall model latency. Extensive experiments show that PP-MobileSeg achieves a superior tradeoff between accuracy, model size, and latency compared to other methods. On the ADE20K dataset, PP-MobileSeg achieves 1.57% higher accuracy in mIoU than SeaFormer-Base with 32.9% fewer parameters and 42.3% faster acceleration on Qualcomm Snapdragon 855. Source codes are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg/tree/release/2.8.
R-SCoRe: Revisiting Scene Coordinate Regression for Robust Large-Scale Visual Localization
Learning-based visual localization methods that use scene coordinate regression (SCR) offer the advantage of smaller map sizes. However, on datasets with complex illumination changes or image-level ambiguities, it remains a less robust alternative to feature matching methods. This work aims to close the gap. We introduce a covisibility graph-based global encoding learning and data augmentation strategy, along with a depth-adjusted reprojection loss to facilitate implicit triangulation. Additionally, we revisit the network architecture and local feature extraction module. Our method achieves state-of-the-art on challenging large-scale datasets without relying on network ensembles or 3D supervision. On Aachen Day-Night, we are 10times more accurate than previous SCR methods with similar map sizes and require at least 5times smaller map sizes than any other SCR method while still delivering superior accuracy. Code will be available at: https://github.com/cvg/scrstudio .
MVPSNet: Fast Generalizable Multi-view Photometric Stereo
We propose a fast and generalizable solution to Multi-view Photometric Stereo (MVPS), called MVPSNet. The key to our approach is a feature extraction network that effectively combines images from the same view captured under multiple lighting conditions to extract geometric features from shading cues for stereo matching. We demonstrate these features, termed `Light Aggregated Feature Maps' (LAFM), are effective for feature matching even in textureless regions, where traditional multi-view stereo methods fail. Our method produces similar reconstruction results to PS-NeRF, a state-of-the-art MVPS method that optimizes a neural network per-scene, while being 411times faster (105 seconds vs. 12 hours) in inference. Additionally, we introduce a new synthetic dataset for MVPS, sMVPS, which is shown to be effective to train a generalizable MVPS method.
PivotNet: Vectorized Pivot Learning for End-to-end HD Map Construction
Vectorized high-definition map online construction has garnered considerable attention in the field of autonomous driving research. Most existing approaches model changeable map elements using a fixed number of points, or predict local maps in a two-stage autoregressive manner, which may miss essential details and lead to error accumulation. Towards precise map element learning, we propose a simple yet effective architecture named PivotNet, which adopts unified pivot-based map representations and is formulated as a direct set prediction paradigm. Concretely, we first propose a novel point-to-line mask module to encode both the subordinate and geometrical point-line priors in the network. Then, a well-designed pivot dynamic matching module is proposed to model the topology in dynamic point sequences by introducing the concept of sequence matching. Furthermore, to supervise the position and topology of the vectorized point predictions, we propose a dynamic vectorized sequence loss. Extensive experiments and ablations show that PivotNet is remarkably superior to other SOTAs by 5.9 mAP at least. The code will be available soon.
ImagePairs: Realistic Super Resolution Dataset via Beam Splitter Camera Rig
Super Resolution is the problem of recovering a high-resolution image from a single or multiple low-resolution images of the same scene. It is an ill-posed problem since high frequency visual details of the scene are completely lost in low-resolution images. To overcome this, many machine learning approaches have been proposed aiming at training a model to recover the lost details in the new scenes. Such approaches include the recent successful effort in utilizing deep learning techniques to solve super resolution problem. As proven, data itself plays a significant role in the machine learning process especially deep learning approaches which are data hungry. Therefore, to solve the problem, the process of gathering data and its formation could be equally as vital as the machine learning technique used. Herein, we are proposing a new data acquisition technique for gathering real image data set which could be used as an input for super resolution, noise cancellation and quality enhancement techniques. We use a beam-splitter to capture the same scene by a low resolution camera and a high resolution camera. Since we also release the raw images, this large-scale dataset could be used for other tasks such as ISP generation. Unlike current small-scale dataset used for these tasks, our proposed dataset includes 11,421 pairs of low-resolution high-resolution images of diverse scenes. To our knowledge this is the most complete dataset for super resolution, ISP and image quality enhancement. The benchmarking result shows how the new dataset can be successfully used to significantly improve the quality of real-world image super resolution.
Swivel: Improving Embeddings by Noticing What's Missing
We present Submatrix-wise Vector Embedding Learner (Swivel), a method for generating low-dimensional feature embeddings from a feature co-occurrence matrix. Swivel performs approximate factorization of the point-wise mutual information matrix via stochastic gradient descent. It uses a piecewise loss with special handling for unobserved co-occurrences, and thus makes use of all the information in the matrix. While this requires computation proportional to the size of the entire matrix, we make use of vectorized multiplication to process thousands of rows and columns at once to compute millions of predicted values. Furthermore, we partition the matrix into shards in order to parallelize the computation across many nodes. This approach results in more accurate embeddings than can be achieved with methods that consider only observed co-occurrences, and can scale to much larger corpora than can be handled with sampling methods.
SuperMapNet for Long-Range and High-Accuracy Vectorized HD Map Construction
Vectorized HD map is essential for autonomous driving. Remarkable work has been achieved in recent years, but there are still major issues: (1) in the generation of the BEV features, single modality-based methods are of limited perception capability, while direct concatenation-based multi-modal methods fail to capture synergies and disparities between different modalities, resulting in limited ranges with feature holes; (2) in the classification and localization of map elements, only point information is used without the consideration of element infor-mation and neglects the interaction between point information and element information, leading to erroneous shapes and element entanglement with low accuracy. To address above issues, we introduce SuperMapNet for long-range and high-accuracy vectorized HD map construction. It uses both camera images and LiDAR point clouds as input, and first tightly couple semantic information from camera images and geometric information from LiDAR point clouds by a cross-attention based synergy enhancement module and a flow-based disparity alignment module for long-range BEV feature generation. And then, local features from point queries and global features from element queries are tightly coupled by three-level interactions for high-accuracy classification and localization, where Point2Point interaction learns local geometric information between points of the same element and of each point, Element2Element interaction learns relation constraints between different elements and semantic information of each elements, and Point2Element interaction learns complement element information for its constituent points. Experiments on the nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets demonstrate superior performances, surpassing SOTAs over 14.9/8.8 mAP and 18.5/3.1 mAP under hard/easy settings, respectively. The code is made publicly available1.
Zero-Shot 3D Shape Correspondence
We propose a novel zero-shot approach to computing correspondences between 3D shapes. Existing approaches mainly focus on isometric and near-isometric shape pairs (e.g., human vs. human), but less attention has been given to strongly non-isometric and inter-class shape matching (e.g., human vs. cow). To this end, we introduce a fully automatic method that exploits the exceptional reasoning capabilities of recent foundation models in language and vision to tackle difficult shape correspondence problems. Our approach comprises multiple stages. First, we classify the 3D shapes in a zero-shot manner by feeding rendered shape views to a language-vision model (e.g., BLIP2) to generate a list of class proposals per shape. These proposals are unified into a single class per shape by employing the reasoning capabilities of ChatGPT. Second, we attempt to segment the two shapes in a zero-shot manner, but in contrast to the co-segmentation problem, we do not require a mutual set of semantic regions. Instead, we propose to exploit the in-context learning capabilities of ChatGPT to generate two different sets of semantic regions for each shape and a semantic mapping between them. This enables our approach to match strongly non-isometric shapes with significant differences in geometric structure. Finally, we employ the generated semantic mapping to produce coarse correspondences that can further be refined by the functional maps framework to produce dense point-to-point maps. Our approach, despite its simplicity, produces highly plausible results in a zero-shot manner, especially between strongly non-isometric shapes.
RSAR: Restricted State Angle Resolver and Rotated SAR Benchmark
Rotated object detection has made significant progress in the optical remote sensing. However, advancements in the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) field are laggard behind, primarily due to the absence of a large-scale dataset. Annotating such a dataset is inefficient and costly. A promising solution is to employ a weakly supervised model (e.g., trained with available horizontal boxes only) to generate pseudo-rotated boxes for reference before manual calibration. Unfortunately, the existing weakly supervised models exhibit limited accuracy in predicting the object's angle. Previous works attempt to enhance angle prediction by using angle resolvers that decouple angles into cosine and sine encodings. In this work, we first reevaluate these resolvers from a unified perspective of dimension mapping and expose that they share the same shortcomings: these methods overlook the unit cycle constraint inherent in these encodings, easily leading to prediction biases. To address this issue, we propose the Unit Cycle Resolver, which incorporates a unit circle constraint loss to improve angle prediction accuracy. Our approach can effectively improve the performance of existing state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods and even surpasses fully supervised models on existing optical benchmarks (i.e., DOTA-v1.0 dataset). With the aid of UCR, we further annotate and introduce RSAR, the largest multi-class rotated SAR object detection dataset to date. Extensive experiments on both RSAR and optical datasets demonstrate that our UCR enhances angle prediction accuracy. Our dataset and code can be found at: https://github.com/zhasion/RSAR.
Unlocking Feature Visualization for Deeper Networks with MAgnitude Constrained Optimization
Feature visualization has gained substantial popularity, particularly after the influential work by Olah et al. in 2017, which established it as a crucial tool for explainability. However, its widespread adoption has been limited due to a reliance on tricks to generate interpretable images, and corresponding challenges in scaling it to deeper neural networks. Here, we describe MACO, a simple approach to address these shortcomings. The main idea is to generate images by optimizing the phase spectrum while keeping the magnitude constant to ensure that generated explanations lie in the space of natural images. Our approach yields significantly better results (both qualitatively and quantitatively) and unlocks efficient and interpretable feature visualizations for large state-of-the-art neural networks. We also show that our approach exhibits an attribution mechanism allowing us to augment feature visualizations with spatial importance. We validate our method on a novel benchmark for comparing feature visualization methods, and release its visualizations for all classes of the ImageNet dataset on https://serre-lab.github.io/Lens/. Overall, our approach unlocks, for the first time, feature visualizations for large, state-of-the-art deep neural networks without resorting to any parametric prior image model.
PanSplat: 4K Panorama Synthesis with Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting
With the advent of portable 360{\deg} cameras, panorama has gained significant attention in applications like virtual reality (VR), virtual tours, robotics, and autonomous driving. As a result, wide-baseline panorama view synthesis has emerged as a vital task, where high resolution, fast inference, and memory efficiency are essential. Nevertheless, existing methods are typically constrained to lower resolutions (512 times 1024) due to demanding memory and computational requirements. In this paper, we present PanSplat, a generalizable, feed-forward approach that efficiently supports resolution up to 4K (2048 times 4096). Our approach features a tailored spherical 3D Gaussian pyramid with a Fibonacci lattice arrangement, enhancing image quality while reducing information redundancy. To accommodate the demands of high resolution, we propose a pipeline that integrates a hierarchical spherical cost volume and Gaussian heads with local operations, enabling two-step deferred backpropagation for memory-efficient training on a single A100 GPU. Experiments demonstrate that PanSplat achieves state-of-the-art results with superior efficiency and image quality across both synthetic and real-world datasets. Code will be available at https://github.com/chengzhag/PanSplat.
LASER: LAtent SpacE Rendering for 2D Visual Localization
We present LASER, an image-based Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) framework for 2D floor maps. LASER introduces the concept of latent space rendering, where 2D pose hypotheses on the floor map are directly rendered into a geometrically-structured latent space by aggregating viewing ray features. Through a tightly coupled rendering codebook scheme, the viewing ray features are dynamically determined at rendering-time based on their geometries (i.e. length, incident-angle), endowing our representation with view-dependent fine-grain variability. Our codebook scheme effectively disentangles feature encoding from rendering, allowing the latent space rendering to run at speeds above 10KHz. Moreover, through metric learning, our geometrically-structured latent space is common to both pose hypotheses and query images with arbitrary field of views. As a result, LASER achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-scale indoor localization datasets (i.e. ZInD and Structured3D) for both panorama and perspective image queries, while significantly outperforming existing learning-based methods in speed.
