Abstract: Deployments of real-world object detection systems often experience a degradation in performance over time due to concept drift. Systems that leverage thermal cameras are especially susceptible because the respective thermal signatures of objects and their surroundings are highly sensitive to environmental changes. In this study, two types of weather-aware latent conditioning methods are investigated. The proposed method aims to guide two object detectors, (YOLOv5 and Deformable DETR) to become weather-aware. This is achieved by leveraging an auxiliary branch that predicts weather-related information while conditioning intermediate layers of the object detector. While the conditioning methods proposed do not directly improve the accuracy of baseline detectors, it can be observed that conditioned networks manage to extract a weather-related signal from the thermal images, thus resulting in a decreased miss rate at the cost of increased false positives. The extracted signal appears noisy and is thus challenging to regress accurately. This is most likely a result of the qualitative nature of the thermal sensor; thus, further work is needed to identify an ideal method for optimizing the conditioning branch, as well as to further improve the accuracy of the system.

Abstract: Most of Continual Learning (CL) methods push the limit of supervised learning settings, where an agent is expected to learn new labeled tasks and not forget previous knowledge. However, these settings are not well aligned with real-life scenarios, where a learning agent has access to a vast amount of unlabeled data encompassing both novel (entirely unlabeled) classes and examples from known classes. Drawing inspiration from Generalized Category Discovery (GCD), we introduce a novel framework that relaxes this assumption. Precisely, in any task, we allow for the existence of novel and known classes, and one must use continual version of unsupervised learning methods to discover them. We call this setting Generalized Continual Category Discovery (GCCD). It unifies CL and GCD, bridging the gap between synthetic benchmarks and real-life scenarios. With a series of experiments, we present that existing methods fail to accumulate knowledge from subsequent tasks in which unlabeled samples of novel classes are present. In light of these limitations, we propose a method that incorporates both supervised and unsupervised signals and mitigates the forgetting through the use of centroid adaptation. Our method surpasses strong CL methods adopted for GCD techniques and presents a superior representation learning performance.

Abstract: Document layout analysis is a known problem to the documents research community and has been vastly explored yielding a multitude of solutions ranging from text mining, and recognition to graph-based representation, visual feature extraction, etc. However, most of the existing works have ignored the crucial fact regarding the scarcity of labeled data. With growing internet connectivity to personal life, an enormous amount of documents had been available in the public domain and thus making data annotation a tedious task. We address this challenge using self-supervision and unlike, the few existing self-supervised document segmentation approaches which use text mining and textual labels, we use a complete vision-based approach in pre-training without any ground-truth label or its derivative. Instead, we generate pseudo-layouts from the document images to pre-train an image encoder to learn the document object representation and localization in a self-supervised framework before fine-tuning it with an object detection model. We show that our pipeline sets a new benchmark in this context and performs at par with the existing methods and the supervised counterparts, if not outperforms. The code is made publicly available at: this https URL

Abstract: The goal of the challenge is to develop a test-time adaptation (TTA) method, which could adapt the model to gradually changing domains in video sequences for semantic segmentation task. It is based on a synthetic driving video dataset – SHIFT. The source model is trained on images taken during daytime in clear weather. Domain changes at test-time are mainly caused by varying weather conditions and times of day. The TTA methods are evaluated in each image sequence (video) separately, meaning the model is reset to the source model state before the next sequence. Images come one by one and a prediction has to be made at the arrival of each frame. Each sequence is composed of 401 images and starts with the source domain, then gradually drifts to a different one (changing weather or time of day) until the middle of the sequence. In the second half of the sequence, the domain gradually shifts back to the source one. Ground truth data is available only for the validation split of the SHIFT dataset, in which there are only six sequences that start and end with the source domain. We conduct an analysis specifically on those sequences. Ground truth data for test split, on which the developed TTA methods are evaluated for leader board ranking, are not publicly available.
The proposed solution secured a 3rd place in a challenge and received an innovation award. Contrary to the solutions that scored better, we did not use any external pretrained models or specialized data augmentations, to keep the solutions as general as possible. We have focused on analyzing the distributional shift and developing a method that could adapt to changing data dynamics and generalize across different scenarios.

Abstract: The field of visual document understanding has witnessed a rapid growth in emerging challenges and powerful multi-modal strategies. However, they rely on an extensive amount of document data to learn their pretext objectives in a ``pre-train-then-fine-tune'' paradigm and thus, suffer a significant performance drop in real-world online industrial settings. One major reason is the over-reliance on OCR engines to extract local positional information within a document page. Therefore, this hinders the model's generalizability, flexibility and robustness due to the lack of capturing global information within a document image. We introduce TransferDoc, a cross-modal transformer-based architecture pre-trained in a self-supervised fashion using three novel pretext objectives. TransferDoc learns richer semantic concepts by unifying language and visual representations, which enables the production of more transferable models. Besides, two novel downstream tasks have been introduced for a ``closer-to-real'' industrial evaluation scenario where TransferDoc outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract: This paper presents an innovative architecture based on a Cycle Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) for the synthesis of high-quality depth maps from monocular images. The proposed architecture leverages a diverse set of loss functions, including cycle consistency, contrastive, identity, and least square losses, to facilitate the generation of depth maps that exhibit realism and high fidelity. A notable feature of the approach is its ability to synthesize depth maps from grayscale images without the need for paired training data. Extensive comparisons with different state-of-the-art methods show the superiority of the proposed approach in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. This work addresses the challenge of depth map synthesis and offers significant advancements in the field.

Abstract: Guided image processing techniques are widely used for extracting information from a guiding image to aid in the processing of the guided one. These images may be sourced from different modalities, such as 2D and 3D, or different spectral bands, like visible and infrared. In the case of guided cross-spectral super-resolution, features from the two modal images are extracted and efficiently merged to migrate guidance information from one image, usually high-resolution (HR), toward the guided one, usually low-resolution (LR). Different approaches have been recently proposed focusing on the development of architectures for feature extraction and merging in the cross-spectral domains, but none of them care about the different nature of the given images. This paper focuses on the specific problem of guided thermal image super-resolution, where an LR thermal image is enhanced by an HR visible spectrum image. To improve existing guided super-resolution techniques, a novel scheme is proposed that maps the original guiding information to a thermal image-like representation that is similar to the output. Experimental results evaluating five different approaches demonstrate that the best results are achieved when the guiding and guided images share the same domain.