Get trending papers in your email inbox once a day!
Get trending papers in your email inbox!
SubscribeBeyond Image Borders: Learning Feature Extrapolation for Unbounded Image Composition
For improving image composition and aesthetic quality, most existing methods modulate the captured images by striking out redundant content near the image borders. However, such image cropping methods are limited in the range of image views. Some methods have been suggested to extrapolate the images and predict cropping boxes from the extrapolated image. Nonetheless, the synthesized extrapolated regions may be included in the cropped image, making the image composition result not real and potentially with degraded image quality. In this paper, we circumvent this issue by presenting a joint framework for both unbounded recommendation of camera view and image composition (i.e., UNIC). In this way, the cropped image is a sub-image of the image acquired by the predicted camera view, and thus can be guaranteed to be real and consistent in image quality. Specifically, our framework takes the current camera preview frame as input and provides a recommendation for view adjustment, which contains operations unlimited by the image borders, such as zooming in or out and camera movement. To improve the prediction accuracy of view adjustment prediction, we further extend the field of view by feature extrapolation. After one or several times of view adjustments, our method converges and results in both a camera view and a bounding box showing the image composition recommendation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the datasets constructed upon existing image cropping datasets, showing the effectiveness of our UNIC in unbounded recommendation of camera view and image composition. The source code, dataset, and pretrained models is available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/UNIC.
ExtraNeRF: Visibility-Aware View Extrapolation of Neural Radiance Fields with Diffusion Models
We propose ExtraNeRF, a novel method for extrapolating the range of views handled by a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). Our main idea is to leverage NeRFs to model scene-specific, fine-grained details, while capitalizing on diffusion models to extrapolate beyond our observed data. A key ingredient is to track visibility to determine what portions of the scene have not been observed, and focus on reconstructing those regions consistently with diffusion models. Our primary contributions include a visibility-aware diffusion-based inpainting module that is fine-tuned on the input imagery, yielding an initial NeRF with moderate quality (often blurry) inpainted regions, followed by a second diffusion model trained on the input imagery to consistently enhance, notably sharpen, the inpainted imagery from the first pass. We demonstrate high-quality results, extrapolating beyond a small number of (typically six or fewer) input views, effectively outpainting the NeRF as well as inpainting newly disoccluded regions inside the original viewing volume. We compare with related work both quantitatively and qualitatively and show significant gains over prior art.
DFR: Deep Feature Reconstruction for Unsupervised Anomaly Segmentation
Automatic detecting anomalous regions in images of objects or textures without priors of the anomalies is challenging, especially when the anomalies appear in very small areas of the images, making difficult-to-detect visual variations, such as defects on manufacturing products. This paper proposes an effective unsupervised anomaly segmentation approach that can detect and segment out the anomalies in small and confined regions of images. Concretely, we develop a multi-scale regional feature generator that can generate multiple spatial context-aware representations from pre-trained deep convolutional networks for every subregion of an image. The regional representations not only describe the local characteristics of corresponding regions but also encode their multiple spatial context information, making them discriminative and very beneficial for anomaly detection. Leveraging these descriptive regional features, we then design a deep yet efficient convolutional autoencoder and detect anomalous regions within images via fast feature reconstruction. Our method is simple yet effective and efficient. It advances the state-of-the-art performances on several benchmark datasets and shows great potential for real applications.
DiffDreamer: Towards Consistent Unsupervised Single-view Scene Extrapolation with Conditional Diffusion Models
Scene extrapolation -- the idea of generating novel views by flying into a given image -- is a promising, yet challenging task. For each predicted frame, a joint inpainting and 3D refinement problem has to be solved, which is ill posed and includes a high level of ambiguity. Moreover, training data for long-range scenes is difficult to obtain and usually lacks sufficient views to infer accurate camera poses. We introduce DiffDreamer, an unsupervised framework capable of synthesizing novel views depicting a long camera trajectory while training solely on internet-collected images of nature scenes. Utilizing the stochastic nature of the guided denoising steps, we train the diffusion models to refine projected RGBD images but condition the denoising steps on multiple past and future frames for inference. We demonstrate that image-conditioned diffusion models can effectively perform long-range scene extrapolation while preserving consistency significantly better than prior GAN-based methods. DiffDreamer is a powerful and efficient solution for scene extrapolation, producing impressive results despite limited supervision. Project page: https://primecai.github.io/diffdreamer.
R-MAE: Regions Meet Masked Autoencoders
Vision-specific concepts such as "region" have played a key role in extending general machine learning frameworks to tasks like object detection. Given the success of region-based detectors for supervised learning and the progress of intra-image methods for contrastive learning, we explore the use of regions for reconstructive pre-training. Starting from Masked Autoencoding (MAE) both as a baseline and an inspiration, we propose a parallel pre-text task tailored to address the one-to-many mapping between images and regions. Since such regions can be generated in an unsupervised way, our approach (R-MAE) inherits the wide applicability from MAE, while being more "region-aware". We conduct thorough analyses during the development of R-MAE, and converge on a variant that is both effective and efficient (1.3% overhead over MAE). Moreover, it shows consistent quantitative improvements when generalized to various pre-training data and downstream detection and segmentation benchmarks. Finally, we provide extensive qualitative visualizations to enhance the understanding of R-MAE's behaviour and potential. Code will be made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/r-mae.
Volumetric Reconstruction Resolves Off-Resonance Artifacts in Static and Dynamic PROPELLER MRI
Off-resonance artifacts in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are visual distortions that occur when the actual resonant frequencies of spins within the imaging volume differ from the expected frequencies used to encode spatial information. These discrepancies can be caused by a variety of factors, including magnetic field inhomogeneities, chemical shifts, or susceptibility differences within the tissues. Such artifacts can manifest as blurring, ghosting, or misregistration of the reconstructed image, and they often compromise its diagnostic quality. We propose to resolve these artifacts by lifting the 2D MRI reconstruction problem to 3D, introducing an additional "spectral" dimension to model this off-resonance. Our approach is inspired by recent progress in modeling radiance fields, and is capable of reconstructing both static and dynamic MR images as well as separating fat and water, which is of independent clinical interest. We demonstrate our approach in the context of PROPELLER (Periodically Rotated Overlapping ParallEL Lines with Enhanced Reconstruction) MRI acquisitions, which are popular for their robustness to motion artifacts. Our method operates in a few minutes on a single GPU, and to our knowledge is the first to correct for chemical shift in gradient echo PROPELLER MRI reconstruction without additional measurements or pretraining data.
ZONE: Zero-Shot Instruction-Guided Local Editing
Recent advances in vision-language models like Stable Diffusion have shown remarkable power in creative image synthesis and editing.However, most existing text-to-image editing methods encounter two obstacles: First, the text prompt needs to be carefully crafted to achieve good results, which is not intuitive or user-friendly. Second, they are insensitive to local edits and can irreversibly affect non-edited regions, leaving obvious editing traces. To tackle these problems, we propose a Zero-shot instructiON-guided local image Editing approach, termed ZONE. We first convert the editing intent from the user-provided instruction (e.g., "make his tie blue") into specific image editing regions through InstructPix2Pix. We then propose a Region-IoU scheme for precise image layer extraction from an off-the-shelf segment model. We further develop an edge smoother based on FFT for seamless blending between the layer and the image.Our method allows for arbitrary manipulation of a specific region with a single instruction while preserving the rest. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ZONE achieves remarkable local editing results and user-friendliness, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/lsl001006/ZONE.
EXIF as Language: Learning Cross-Modal Associations Between Images and Camera Metadata
We learn a visual representation that captures information about the camera that recorded a given photo. To do this, we train a multimodal embedding between image patches and the EXIF metadata that cameras automatically insert into image files. Our model represents this metadata by simply converting it to text and then processing it with a transformer. The features that we learn significantly outperform other self-supervised and supervised features on downstream image forensics and calibration tasks. In particular, we successfully localize spliced image regions "zero shot" by clustering the visual embeddings for all of the patches within an image.
Painting Outside as Inside: Edge Guided Image Outpainting via Bidirectional Rearrangement with Progressive Step Learning
Image outpainting is a very intriguing problem as the outside of a given image can be continuously filled by considering as the context of the image. This task has two main challenges. The first is to maintain the spatial consistency in contents of generated regions and the original input. The second is to generate a high-quality large image with a small amount of adjacent information. Conventional image outpainting methods generate inconsistent, blurry, and repeated pixels. To alleviate the difficulty of an outpainting problem, we propose a novel image outpainting method using bidirectional boundary region rearrangement. We rearrange the image to benefit from the image inpainting task by reflecting more directional information. The bidirectional boundary region rearrangement enables the generation of the missing region using bidirectional information similar to that of the image inpainting task, thereby generating the higher quality than the conventional methods using unidirectional information. Moreover, we use the edge map generator that considers images as original input with structural information and hallucinates the edges of unknown regions to generate the image. Our proposed method is compared with other state-of-the-art outpainting and inpainting methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. We further compared and evaluated them using BRISQUE, one of the No-Reference image quality assessment (IQA) metrics, to evaluate the naturalness of the output. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other methods and generates new images with 360{\deg}panoramic characteristics.
From Posterior Sampling to Meaningful Diversity in Image Restoration
Image restoration problems are typically ill-posed in the sense that each degraded image can be restored in infinitely many valid ways. To accommodate this, many works generate a diverse set of outputs by attempting to randomly sample from the posterior distribution of natural images given the degraded input. Here we argue that this strategy is commonly of limited practical value because of the heavy tail of the posterior distribution. Consider for example inpainting a missing region of the sky in an image. Since there is a high probability that the missing region contains no object but clouds, any set of samples from the posterior would be entirely dominated by (practically identical) completions of sky. However, arguably, presenting users with only one clear sky completion, along with several alternative solutions such as airships, birds, and balloons, would better outline the set of possibilities. In this paper, we initiate the study of meaningfully diverse image restoration. We explore several post-processing approaches that can be combined with any diverse image restoration method to yield semantically meaningful diversity. Moreover, we propose a practical approach for allowing diffusion based image restoration methods to generate meaningfully diverse outputs, while incurring only negligent computational overhead. We conduct extensive user studies to analyze the proposed techniques, and find the strategy of reducing similarity between outputs to be significantly favorable over posterior sampling. Code and examples are available at https://noa-cohen.github.io/MeaningfulDiversityInIR.
Regional Attention for Shadow Removal
Shadow, as a natural consequence of light interacting with objects, plays a crucial role in shaping the aesthetics of an image, which however also impairs the content visibility and overall visual quality. Recent shadow removal approaches employ the mechanism of attention, due to its effectiveness, as a key component. However, they often suffer from two issues including large model size and high computational complexity for practical use. To address these shortcomings, this work devises a lightweight yet accurate shadow removal framework. First, we analyze the characteristics of the shadow removal task to seek the key information required for reconstructing shadow regions and designing a novel regional attention mechanism to effectively capture such information. Then, we customize a Regional Attention Shadow Removal Model (RASM, in short), which leverages non-shadow areas to assist in restoring shadow ones. Unlike existing attention-based models, our regional attention strategy allows each shadow region to interact more rationally with its surrounding non-shadow areas, for seeking the regional contextual correlation between shadow and non-shadow areas. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our proposed method delivers superior performance over other state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy and efficiency, making it appealing for practical applications.
CLIP-AD: A Language-Guided Staged Dual-Path Model for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection
This paper considers zero-shot Anomaly Detection (AD), performing AD without reference images of the test objects. We propose a framework called CLIP-AD to leverage the zero-shot capabilities of the large vision-language model CLIP. Firstly, we reinterpret the text prompts design from a distributional perspective and propose a Representative Vector Selection (RVS) paradigm to obtain improved text features. Secondly, we note opposite predictions and irrelevant highlights in the direct computation of the anomaly maps. To address these issues, we introduce a Staged Dual-Path model (SDP) that leverages features from various levels and applies architecture and feature surgery. Lastly, delving deeply into the two phenomena, we point out that the image and text features are not aligned in the joint embedding space. Thus, we introduce a fine-tuning strategy by adding linear layers and construct an extended model SDP+, further enhancing the performance. Abundant experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, e.g., on MVTec-AD, SDP outperforms the SOTA WinCLIP by +4.2/+10.7 in segmentation metrics F1-max/PRO, while SDP+ achieves +8.3/+20.5 improvements.
Dynamic Prompt Learning: Addressing Cross-Attention Leakage for Text-Based Image Editing
Large-scale text-to-image generative models have been a ground-breaking development in generative AI, with diffusion models showing their astounding ability to synthesize convincing images following an input text prompt. The goal of image editing research is to give users control over the generated images by modifying the text prompt. Current image editing techniques are susceptible to unintended modifications of regions outside the targeted area, such as on the background or on distractor objects which have some semantic or visual relationship with the targeted object. According to our experimental findings, inaccurate cross-attention maps are at the root of this problem. Based on this observation, we propose Dynamic Prompt Learning (DPL) to force cross-attention maps to focus on correct noun words in the text prompt. By updating the dynamic tokens for nouns in the textual input with the proposed leakage repairment losses, we achieve fine-grained image editing over particular objects while preventing undesired changes to other image regions. Our method DPL, based on the publicly available Stable Diffusion, is extensively evaluated on a wide range of images, and consistently obtains superior results both quantitatively (CLIP score, Structure-Dist) and qualitatively (on user-evaluation). We show improved prompt editing results for Word-Swap, Prompt Refinement, and Attention Re-weighting, especially for complex multi-object scenes.
Unlimited-Size Diffusion Restoration
Recently, using diffusion models for zero-shot image restoration (IR) has become a new hot paradigm. This type of method only needs to use the pre-trained off-the-shelf diffusion models, without any finetuning, and can directly handle various IR tasks. The upper limit of the restoration performance depends on the pre-trained diffusion models, which are in rapid evolution. However, current methods only discuss how to deal with fixed-size images, but dealing with images of arbitrary sizes is very important for practical applications. This paper focuses on how to use those diffusion-based zero-shot IR methods to deal with any size while maintaining the excellent characteristics of zero-shot. A simple way to solve arbitrary size is to divide it into fixed-size patches and solve each patch independently. But this may yield significant artifacts since it neither considers the global semantics of all patches nor the local information of adjacent patches. Inspired by the Range-Null space Decomposition, we propose the Mask-Shift Restoration to address local incoherence and propose the Hierarchical Restoration to alleviate out-of-domain issues. Our simple, parameter-free approaches can be used not only for image restoration but also for image generation of unlimited sizes, with the potential to be a general tool for diffusion models. Code: https://github.com/wyhuai/DDNM/tree/main/hq_demo
Learning Multi-Scale Photo Exposure Correction
Capturing photographs with wrong exposures remains a major source of errors in camera-based imaging. Exposure problems are categorized as either: (i) overexposed, where the camera exposure was too long, resulting in bright and washed-out image regions, or (ii) underexposed, where the exposure was too short, resulting in dark regions. Both under- and overexposure greatly reduce the contrast and visual appeal of an image. Prior work mainly focuses on underexposed images or general image enhancement. In contrast, our proposed method targets both over- and underexposure errors in photographs. We formulate the exposure correction problem as two main sub-problems: (i) color enhancement and (ii) detail enhancement. Accordingly, we propose a coarse-to-fine deep neural network (DNN) model, trainable in an end-to-end manner, that addresses each sub-problem separately. A key aspect of our solution is a new dataset of over 24,000 images exhibiting the broadest range of exposure values to date with a corresponding properly exposed image. Our method achieves results on par with existing state-of-the-art methods on underexposed images and yields significant improvements for images suffering from overexposure errors.
Detecting Image Forgeries using Geometric Cues
This chapter presents a framework for detecting fake regions by using various methods including watermarking technique and blind approaches. In particular, we describe current categories on blind approaches which can be divided into five: pixel-based techniques, format-based techniques, camera-based techniques, physically-based techniques and geometric-based techniques. Then we take a second look on the geometric-based techniques and further categorize them in detail. In the following section, the state-of-the-art methods involved in the geometric technique are elaborated.
Towards Coherent Image Inpainting Using Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models
Image inpainting refers to the task of generating a complete, natural image based on a partially revealed reference image. Recently, many research interests have been focused on addressing this problem using fixed diffusion models. These approaches typically directly replace the revealed region of the intermediate or final generated images with that of the reference image or its variants. However, since the unrevealed regions are not directly modified to match the context, it results in incoherence between revealed and unrevealed regions. To address the incoherence problem, a small number of methods introduce a rigorous Bayesian framework, but they tend to introduce mismatches between the generated and the reference images due to the approximation errors in computing the posterior distributions. In this paper, we propose COPAINT, which can coherently inpaint the whole image without introducing mismatches. COPAINT also uses the Bayesian framework to jointly modify both revealed and unrevealed regions, but approximates the posterior distribution in a way that allows the errors to gradually drop to zero throughout the denoising steps, thus strongly penalizing any mismatches with the reference image. Our experiments verify that COPAINT can outperform the existing diffusion-based methods under both objective and subjective metrics. The codes are available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/CoPaint/.
Does Medical Imaging learn different Convolution Filters?
Recent work has investigated the distributions of learned convolution filters through a large-scale study containing hundreds of heterogeneous image models. Surprisingly, on average, the distributions only show minor drifts in comparisons of various studied dimensions including the learned task, image domain, or dataset. However, among the studied image domains, medical imaging models appeared to show significant outliers through "spikey" distributions, and, therefore, learn clusters of highly specific filters different from other domains. Following this observation, we study the collected medical imaging models in more detail. We show that instead of fundamental differences, the outliers are due to specific processing in some architectures. Quite the contrary, for standardized architectures, we find that models trained on medical data do not significantly differ in their filter distributions from similar architectures trained on data from other domains. Our conclusions reinforce previous hypotheses stating that pre-training of imaging models can be done with any kind of diverse image data.
MedTrinity-25M: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset with Multigranular Annotations for Medicine
This paper introduces MedTrinity-25M, a comprehensive, large-scale multimodal dataset for medicine, covering over 25 million images across 10 modalities, with multigranular annotations for more than 65 diseases. These enriched annotations encompass both global textual information, such as disease/lesion type, modality, region-specific descriptions, and inter-regional relationships, as well as detailed local annotations for regions of interest (ROIs), including bounding boxes, segmentation masks. Unlike existing approach which is limited by the availability of image-text pairs, we have developed the first automated pipeline that scales up multimodal data by generating multigranular visual and texual annotations (in the form of image-ROI-description triplets) without the need for any paired text descriptions. Specifically, data from over 90 different sources have been collected, preprocessed, and grounded using domain-specific expert models to identify ROIs related to abnormal regions. We then build a comprehensive knowledge base and prompt multimodal large language models to perform retrieval-augmented generation with the identified ROIs as guidance, resulting in multigranular texual descriptions. Compared to existing datasets, MedTrinity-25M provides the most enriched annotations, supporting a comprehensive range of multimodal tasks such as captioning and report generation, as well as vision-centric tasks like classification and segmentation. Pretraining on MedTrinity-25M, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on VQA-RAD and PathVQA, surpassing both multimodal large language models and other representative SoTA approaches. This dataset can also be utilized to support large-scale pre-training of multimodal medical AI models, contributing to the development of future foundation models in the medical domain.
Half Wavelet Attention on M-Net+ for Low-Light Image Enhancement
Low-Light Image Enhancement is a computer vision task which intensifies the dark images to appropriate brightness. It can also be seen as an ill-posed problem in image restoration domain. With the success of deep neural networks, the convolutional neural networks surpass the traditional algorithm-based methods and become the mainstream in the computer vision area. To advance the performance of enhancement algorithms, we propose an image enhancement network (HWMNet) based on an improved hierarchical model: M-Net+. Specifically, we use a half wavelet attention block on M-Net+ to enrich the features from wavelet domain. Furthermore, our HWMNet has competitive performance results on two image enhancement datasets in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality. The source code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/FanChiMao/HWMNet.
I-Max: Maximize the Resolution Potential of Pre-trained Rectified Flow Transformers with Projected Flow
Rectified Flow Transformers (RFTs) offer superior training and inference efficiency, making them likely the most viable direction for scaling up diffusion models. However, progress in generation resolution has been relatively slow due to data quality and training costs. Tuning-free resolution extrapolation presents an alternative, but current methods often reduce generative stability, limiting practical application. In this paper, we review existing resolution extrapolation methods and introduce the I-Max framework to maximize the resolution potential of Text-to-Image RFTs. I-Max features: (i) a novel Projected Flow strategy for stable extrapolation and (ii) an advanced inference toolkit for generalizing model knowledge to higher resolutions. Experiments with Lumina-Next-2K and Flux.1-dev demonstrate I-Max's ability to enhance stability in resolution extrapolation and show that it can bring image detail emergence and artifact correction, confirming the practical value of tuning-free resolution extrapolation.
Deep Portrait Image Completion and Extrapolation
General image completion and extrapolation methods often fail on portrait images where parts of the human body need to be recovered - a task that requires accurate human body structure and appearance synthesis. We present a two-stage deep learning framework for tacking this problem. In the first stage, given a portrait image with an incomplete human body, we extract a complete, coherent human body structure through a human parsing network, which focuses on structure recovery inside the unknown region with the help of pose estimation. In the second stage, we use an image completion network to fill the unknown region, guided by the structure map recovered in the first stage. For realistic synthesis the completion network is trained with both perceptual loss and conditional adversarial loss. We evaluate our method on public portrait image datasets, and show that it outperforms other state-of-art general image completion methods. Our method enables new portrait image editing applications such as occlusion removal and portrait extrapolation. We further show that the proposed general learning framework can be applied to other types of images, e.g. animal images.
PatchCraft: Exploring Texture Patch for Efficient AI-generated Image Detection
Recent generative models show impressive performance in generating photographic images. Humans can hardly distinguish such incredibly realistic-looking AI-generated images from real ones. AI-generated images may lead to ubiquitous disinformation dissemination. Therefore, it is of utmost urgency to develop a detector to identify AI generated images. Most existing detectors suffer from sharp performance drops over unseen generative models. In this paper, we propose a novel AI-generated image detector capable of identifying fake images created by a wide range of generative models. We observe that the texture patches of images tend to reveal more traces left by generative models compared to the global semantic information of the images. A novel Smash&Reconstruction preprocessing is proposed to erase the global semantic information and enhance texture patches. Furthermore, pixels in rich texture regions exhibit more significant fluctuations than those in poor texture regions. Synthesizing realistic rich texture regions proves to be more challenging for existing generative models. Based on this principle, we leverage the inter-pixel correlation contrast between rich and poor texture regions within an image to further boost the detection performance. In addition, we build a comprehensive AI-generated image detection benchmark, which includes 17 kinds of prevalent generative models, to evaluate the effectiveness of existing baselines and our approach. Our benchmark provides a leaderboard for follow-up studies. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin. Our project: https://fdmas.github.io/AIGCDetect
StyleDiffusion: Prompt-Embedding Inversion for Text-Based Editing
A significant research effort is focused on exploiting the amazing capacities of pretrained diffusion models for the editing of images. They either finetune the model, or invert the image in the latent space of the pretrained model. However, they suffer from two problems: (1) Unsatisfying results for selected regions, and unexpected changes in nonselected regions. (2) They require careful text prompt editing where the prompt should include all visual objects in the input image. To address this, we propose two improvements: (1) Only optimizing the input of the value linear network in the cross-attention layers, is sufficiently powerful to reconstruct a real image. (2) We propose attention regularization to preserve the object-like attention maps after editing, enabling us to obtain accurate style editing without invoking significant structural changes. We further improve the editing technique which is used for the unconditional branch of classifier-free guidance, as well as the conditional one as used by P2P. Extensive experimental prompt-editing results on a variety of images, demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively that our method has superior editing capabilities than existing and concurrent works.
SQUID: Deep Feature In-Painting for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
Radiography imaging protocols focus on particular body regions, therefore producing images of great similarity and yielding recurrent anatomical structures across patients. To exploit this structured information, we propose the use of Space-aware Memory Queues for In-painting and Detecting anomalies from radiography images (abbreviated as SQUID). We show that SQUID can taxonomize the ingrained anatomical structures into recurrent patterns; and in the inference, it can identify anomalies (unseen/modified patterns) in the image. SQUID surpasses 13 state-of-the-art methods in unsupervised anomaly detection by at least 5 points on two chest X-ray benchmark datasets measured by the Area Under the Curve (AUC). Additionally, we have created a new dataset (DigitAnatomy), which synthesizes the spatial correlation and consistent shape in chest anatomy. We hope DigitAnatomy can prompt the development, evaluation, and interpretability of anomaly detection methods.
AccDiffusion v2: Towards More Accurate Higher-Resolution Diffusion Extrapolation
Diffusion models suffer severe object repetition and local distortion when the inference resolution differs from its pre-trained resolution. We propose AccDiffusion v2, an accurate method for patch-wise higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation without training. Our in-depth analysis in this paper shows that using an identical text prompt for different patches leads to repetitive generation, while the absence of a prompt undermines image details. In response, our AccDiffusion v2 novelly decouples the vanilla image-content-aware prompt into a set of patch-content-aware prompts, each of which serves as a more precise description of a patch. Further analysis reveals that local distortion arises from inaccurate descriptions in prompts about the local structure of higher-resolution images. To address this issue, AccDiffusion v2, for the first time, introduces an auxiliary local structural information through ControlNet during higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation aiming to mitigate the local distortions. Finally, our analysis indicates that global semantic information is conducive to suppressing both repetitive generation and local distortion. Hence, our AccDiffusion v2 further proposes dilated sampling with window interaction for better global semantic information during higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation. We conduct extensive experiments, including both quantitative and qualitative comparisons, to demonstrate the efficacy of our AccDiffusion v2. The quantitative comparison shows that AccDiffusion v2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in image generation extrapolation without training. The qualitative comparison intuitively illustrates that AccDiffusion v2 effectively suppresses the issues of repetitive generation and local distortion in image generation extrapolation. Our code is available at https://github.com/lzhxmu/AccDiffusion_v2.
Automated SSIM Regression for Detection and Quantification of Motion Artefacts in Brain MR Images
Motion artefacts in magnetic resonance brain images can have a strong impact on diagnostic confidence. The assessment of MR image quality is fundamental before proceeding with the clinical diagnosis. Motion artefacts can alter the delineation of structures such as the brain, lesions or tumours and may require a repeat scan. Otherwise, an inaccurate (e.g. correct pathology but wrong severity) or incorrect diagnosis (e.g. wrong pathology) may occur. "Image quality assessment" as a fast, automated step right after scanning can assist in deciding if the acquired images are diagnostically sufficient. An automated image quality assessment based on the structural similarity index (SSIM) regression through a residual neural network is proposed in this work. Additionally, a classification into different groups - by subdividing with SSIM ranges - is evaluated. Importantly, this method predicts SSIM values of an input image in the absence of a reference ground truth image. The networks were able to detect motion artefacts, and the best performance for the regression and classification task has always been achieved with ResNet-18 with contrast augmentation. The mean and standard deviation of residuals' distribution were mu=-0.0009 and sigma=0.0139, respectively. Whilst for the classification task in 3, 5 and 10 classes, the best accuracies were 97, 95 and 89\%, respectively. The results show that the proposed method could be a tool for supporting neuro-radiologists and radiographers in evaluating image quality quickly.
Regional Multi-scale Approach for Visually Pleasing Explanations of Deep Neural Networks
Recently, many methods to interpret and visualize deep neural network predictions have been proposed and significant progress has been made. However, a more class-discriminative and visually pleasing explanation is required. Thus, this paper proposes a region-based approach that estimates feature importance in terms of appropriately segmented regions. By fusing the saliency maps generated from multi-scale segmentations, a more class-discriminative and visually pleasing map is obtained. We incorporate this regional multi-scale concept into a prediction difference method that is model-agnostic. An input image is segmented in several scales using the super-pixel method, and exclusion of a region is simulated by sampling a normal distribution constructed using the boundary prior. The experimental results demonstrate that the regional multi-scale method produces much more class-discriminative and visually pleasing saliency maps.
Old Photo Restoration via Deep Latent Space Translation
We propose to restore old photos that suffer from severe degradation through a deep learning approach. Unlike conventional restoration tasks that can be solved through supervised learning, the degradation in real photos is complex and the domain gap between synthetic images and real old photos makes the network fail to generalize. Therefore, we propose a novel triplet domain translation network by leveraging real photos along with massive synthetic image pairs. Specifically, we train two variational autoencoders (VAEs) to respectively transform old photos and clean photos into two latent spaces. And the translation between these two latent spaces is learned with synthetic paired data. This translation generalizes well to real photos because the domain gap is closed in the compact latent space. Besides, to address multiple degradations mixed in one old photo, we design a global branch with apartial nonlocal block targeting to the structured defects, such as scratches and dust spots, and a local branch targeting to the unstructured defects, such as noises and blurriness. Two branches are fused in the latent space, leading to improved capability to restore old photos from multiple defects. Furthermore, we apply another face refinement network to recover fine details of faces in the old photos, thus ultimately generating photos with enhanced perceptual quality. With comprehensive experiments, the proposed pipeline demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art methods as well as existing commercial tools in terms of visual quality for old photos restoration.
Real-time Localized Photorealistic Video Style Transfer
We present a novel algorithm for transferring artistic styles of semantically meaningful local regions of an image onto local regions of a target video while preserving its photorealism. Local regions may be selected either fully automatically from an image, through using video segmentation algorithms, or from casual user guidance such as scribbles. Our method, based on a deep neural network architecture inspired by recent work in photorealistic style transfer, is real-time and works on arbitrary inputs without runtime optimization once trained on a diverse dataset of artistic styles. By augmenting our video dataset with noisy semantic labels and jointly optimizing over style, content, mask, and temporal losses, our method can cope with a variety of imperfections in the input and produce temporally coherent videos without visual artifacts. We demonstrate our method on a variety of style images and target videos, including the ability to transfer different styles onto multiple objects simultaneously, and smoothly transition between styles in time.
CLIPAway: Harmonizing Focused Embeddings for Removing Objects via Diffusion Models
Advanced image editing techniques, particularly inpainting, are essential for seamlessly removing unwanted elements while preserving visual integrity. Traditional GAN-based methods have achieved notable success, but recent advancements in diffusion models have produced superior results due to their training on large-scale datasets, enabling the generation of remarkably realistic inpainted images. Despite their strengths, diffusion models often struggle with object removal tasks without explicit guidance, leading to unintended hallucinations of the removed object. To address this issue, we introduce CLIPAway, a novel approach leveraging CLIP embeddings to focus on background regions while excluding foreground elements. CLIPAway enhances inpainting accuracy and quality by identifying embeddings that prioritize the background, thus achieving seamless object removal. Unlike other methods that rely on specialized training datasets or costly manual annotations, CLIPAway provides a flexible, plug-and-play solution compatible with various diffusion-based inpainting techniques.
Anatomy-Guided Radiology Report Generation with Pathology-Aware Regional Prompts
Radiology reporting generative AI holds significant potential to alleviate clinical workloads and streamline medical care. However, achieving high clinical accuracy is challenging, as radiological images often feature subtle lesions and intricate structures. Existing systems often fall short, largely due to their reliance on fixed size, patch-level image features and insufficient incorporation of pathological information. This can result in the neglect of such subtle patterns and inconsistent descriptions of crucial pathologies. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative approach that leverages pathology-aware regional prompts to explicitly integrate anatomical and pathological information of various scales, significantly enhancing the precision and clinical relevance of generated reports. We develop an anatomical region detector that extracts features from distinct anatomical areas, coupled with a novel multi-label lesion detector that identifies global pathologies. Our approach emulates the diagnostic process of radiologists, producing clinically accurate reports with comprehensive diagnostic capabilities. Experimental results show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on most natural language generation and clinical efficacy metrics, with formal expert evaluations affirming its potential to enhance radiology practice.
Towards True Detail Restoration for Super-Resolution: A Benchmark and a Quality Metric
Super-resolution (SR) has become a widely researched topic in recent years. SR methods can improve overall image and video quality and create new possibilities for further content analysis. But the SR mainstream focuses primarily on increasing the naturalness of the resulting image despite potentially losing context accuracy. Such methods may produce an incorrect digit, character, face, or other structural object even though they otherwise yield good visual quality. Incorrect detail restoration can cause errors when detecting and identifying objects both manually and automatically. To analyze the detail-restoration capabilities of image and video SR models, we developed a benchmark based on our own video dataset, which contains complex patterns that SR models generally fail to correctly restore. We assessed 32 recent SR models using our benchmark and compared their ability to preserve scene context. We also conducted a crowd-sourced comparison of restored details and developed an objective assessment metric that outperforms other quality metrics by correlation with subjective scores for this task. In conclusion, we provide a deep analysis of benchmark results that yields insights for future SR-based work.
Bringing Old Photos Back to Life
We propose to restore old photos that suffer from severe degradation through a deep learning approach. Unlike conventional restoration tasks that can be solved through supervised learning, the degradation in real photos is complex and the domain gap between synthetic images and real old photos makes the network fail to generalize. Therefore, we propose a novel triplet domain translation network by leveraging real photos along with massive synthetic image pairs. Specifically, we train two variational autoencoders (VAEs) to respectively transform old photos and clean photos into two latent spaces. And the translation between these two latent spaces is learned with synthetic paired data. This translation generalizes well to real photos because the domain gap is closed in the compact latent space. Besides, to address multiple degradations mixed in one old photo, we design a global branch with a partial nonlocal block targeting to the structured defects, such as scratches and dust spots, and a local branch targeting to the unstructured defects, such as noises and blurriness. Two branches are fused in the latent space, leading to improved capability to restore old photos from multiple defects. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality for old photos restoration.
ACAT: Adversarial Counterfactual Attention for Classification and Detection in Medical Imaging
In some medical imaging tasks and other settings where only small parts of the image are informative for the classification task, traditional CNNs can sometimes struggle to generalise. Manually annotated Regions of Interest (ROI) are sometimes used to isolate the most informative parts of the image. However, these are expensive to collect and may vary significantly across annotators. To overcome these issues, we propose a framework that employs saliency maps to obtain soft spatial attention masks that modulate the image features at different scales. We refer to our method as Adversarial Counterfactual Attention (ACAT). ACAT increases the baseline classification accuracy of lesions in brain CT scans from 71.39% to 72.55% and of COVID-19 related findings in lung CT scans from 67.71% to 70.84% and exceeds the performance of competing methods. We investigate the best way to generate the saliency maps employed in our architecture and propose a way to obtain them from adversarially generated counterfactual images. They are able to isolate the area of interest in brain and lung CT scans without using any manual annotations. In the task of localising the lesion location out of 6 possible regions, they obtain a score of 65.05% on brain CT scans, improving the score of 61.29% obtained with the best competing method.
DRAG: Dynamic Region-Aware GCN for Privacy-Leaking Image Detection
The daily practice of sharing images on social media raises a severe issue about privacy leakage. To address the issue, privacy-leaking image detection is studied recently, with the goal to automatically identify images that may leak privacy. Recent advance on this task benefits from focusing on crucial objects via pretrained object detectors and modeling their correlation. However, these methods have two limitations: 1) they neglect other important elements like scenes, textures, and objects beyond the capacity of pretrained object detectors; 2) the correlation among objects is fixed, but a fixed correlation is not appropriate for all the images. To overcome the limitations, we propose the Dynamic Region-Aware Graph Convolutional Network (DRAG) that dynamically finds out crucial regions including objects and other important elements, and models their correlation adaptively for each input image. To find out crucial regions, we cluster spatially-correlated feature channels into several region-aware feature maps. Further, we dynamically model the correlation with the self-attention mechanism and explore the interaction among the regions with a graph convolutional network. The DRAG achieved an accuracy of 87% on the largest dataset for privacy-leaking image detection, which is 10 percentage points higher than the state of the art. The further case study demonstrates that it found out crucial regions containing not only objects but other important elements like textures.
Explaining Image Classifiers by Counterfactual Generation
When an image classifier makes a prediction, which parts of the image are relevant and why? We can rephrase this question to ask: which parts of the image, if they were not seen by the classifier, would most change its decision? Producing an answer requires marginalizing over images that could have been seen but weren't. We can sample plausible image in-fills by conditioning a generative model on the rest of the image. We then optimize to find the image regions that most change the classifier's decision after in-fill. Our approach contrasts with ad-hoc in-filling approaches, such as blurring or injecting noise, which generate inputs far from the data distribution, and ignore informative relationships between different parts of the image. Our method produces more compact and relevant saliency maps, with fewer artifacts compared to previous methods.
CasSR: Activating Image Power for Real-World Image Super-Resolution
The objective of image super-resolution is to generate clean and high-resolution images from degraded versions. Recent advancements in diffusion modeling have led to the emergence of various image super-resolution techniques that leverage pretrained text-to-image (T2I) models. Nevertheless, due to the prevalent severe degradation in low-resolution images and the inherent characteristics of diffusion models, achieving high-fidelity image restoration remains challenging. Existing methods often exhibit issues including semantic loss, artifacts, and the introduction of spurious content not present in the original image. To tackle this challenge, we propose Cascaded diffusion for Super-Resolution, CasSR , a novel method designed to produce highly detailed and realistic images. In particular, we develop a cascaded controllable diffusion model that aims to optimize the extraction of information from low-resolution images. This model generates a preliminary reference image to facilitate initial information extraction and degradation mitigation. Furthermore, we propose a multi-attention mechanism to enhance the T2I model's capability in maximizing the restoration of the original image content. Through a comprehensive blend of qualitative and quantitative analyses, we substantiate the efficacy and superiority of our approach.
Alpha-CLIP: A CLIP Model Focusing on Wherever You Want
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) plays an essential role in extracting valuable content information from images across diverse tasks. It aligns textual and visual modalities to comprehend the entire image, including all the details, even those irrelevant to specific tasks. However, for a finer understanding and controlled editing of images, it becomes crucial to focus on specific regions of interest, which can be indicated as points, masks, or boxes by humans or perception models. To fulfill the requirements, we introduce Alpha-CLIP, an enhanced version of CLIP with an auxiliary alpha channel to suggest attentive regions and fine-tuned with constructed millions of RGBA region-text pairs. Alpha-CLIP not only preserves the visual recognition ability of CLIP but also enables precise control over the emphasis of image contents. It demonstrates effectiveness in various tasks, including but not limited to open-world recognition, multimodal large language models, and conditional 2D / 3D generation. It has a strong potential to serve as a versatile tool for image-related tasks.
Unleashing the Power of Prompt-driven Nucleus Instance Segmentation
Nucleus instance segmentation in histology images is crucial for a broad spectrum of clinical applications. Current dominant algorithms rely on regression of nuclear proxy maps. Distinguishing nucleus instances from the estimated maps requires carefully curated post-processing, which is error-prone and parameter-sensitive. Recently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has earned huge attention in medical image segmentation, owing to its impressive generalization ability and promptable property. Nevertheless, its potential on nucleus instance segmentation remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we present a novel prompt-driven framework that consists of a nucleus prompter and SAM for automatic nucleus instance segmentation. Specifically, the prompter learns to generate a unique point prompt for each nucleus while the SAM is fine-tuned to output the corresponding mask for the prompted nucleus. Furthermore, we propose the inclusion of adjacent nuclei as negative prompts to enhance the model's capability to identify overlapping nuclei. Without complicated post-processing, our proposed method sets a new state-of-the-art performance on three challenging benchmarks. Code is available at github.com/windygoo/PromptNucSeg
TopNet: Transformer-based Object Placement Network for Image Compositing
We investigate the problem of automatically placing an object into a background image for image compositing. Given a background image and a segmented object, the goal is to train a model to predict plausible placements (location and scale) of the object for compositing. The quality of the composite image highly depends on the predicted location/scale. Existing works either generate candidate bounding boxes or apply sliding-window search using global representations from background and object images, which fail to model local information in background images. However, local clues in background images are important to determine the compatibility of placing the objects with certain locations/scales. In this paper, we propose to learn the correlation between object features and all local background features with a transformer module so that detailed information can be provided on all possible location/scale configurations. A sparse contrastive loss is further proposed to train our model with sparse supervision. Our new formulation generates a 3D heatmap indicating the plausibility of all location/scale combinations in one network forward pass, which is over 10 times faster than the previous sliding-window method. It also supports interactive search when users provide a pre-defined location or scale. The proposed method can be trained with explicit annotation or in a self-supervised manner using an off-the-shelf inpainting model, and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly. The user study shows that the trained model generalizes well to real-world images with diverse challenging scenes and object categories.
Fillerbuster: Multi-View Scene Completion for Casual Captures
We present Fillerbuster, a method that completes unknown regions of a 3D scene by utilizing a novel large-scale multi-view latent diffusion transformer. Casual captures are often sparse and miss surrounding content behind objects or above the scene. Existing methods are not suitable for handling this challenge as they focus on making the known pixels look good with sparse-view priors, or on creating the missing sides of objects from just one or two photos. In reality, we often have hundreds of input frames and want to complete areas that are missing and unobserved from the input frames. Additionally, the images often do not have known camera parameters. Our solution is to train a generative model that can consume a large context of input frames while generating unknown target views and recovering image poses when desired. We show results where we complete partial captures on two existing datasets. We also present an uncalibrated scene completion task where our unified model predicts both poses and creates new content. Our model is the first to predict many images and poses together for scene completion.
FlexHDR: Modelling Alignment and Exposure Uncertainties for Flexible HDR Imaging
High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is of fundamental importance in modern digital photography pipelines and used to produce a high-quality photograph with well exposed regions despite varying illumination across the image. This is typically achieved by merging multiple low dynamic range (LDR) images taken at different exposures. However, over-exposed regions and misalignment errors due to poorly compensated motion result in artefacts such as ghosting. In this paper, we present a new HDR imaging technique that specifically models alignment and exposure uncertainties to produce high quality HDR results. We introduce a strategy that learns to jointly align and assess the alignment and exposure reliability using an HDR-aware, uncertainty-driven attention map that robustly merges the frames into a single high quality HDR image. Further, we introduce a progressive, multi-stage image fusion approach that can flexibly merge any number of LDR images in a permutation-invariant manner. Experimental results show our method can produce better quality HDR images with up to 1.1dB PSNR improvement to the state-of-the-art, and subjective improvements in terms of better detail, colours, and fewer artefacts.
Rethinking RGB Color Representation for Image Restoration Models
Image restoration models are typically trained with a pixel-wise distance loss defined over the RGB color representation space, which is well known to be a source of blurry and unrealistic textures in the restored images. The reason, we believe, is that the three-channel RGB space is insufficient for supervising the restoration models. To this end, we augment the representation to hold structural information of local neighborhoods at each pixel while keeping the color information and pixel-grainedness unharmed. The result is a new representation space, dubbed augmented RGB (aRGB) space. Substituting the underlying representation space for the per-pixel losses facilitates the training of image restoration models, thereby improving the performance without affecting the evaluation phase. Notably, when combined with auxiliary objectives such as adversarial or perceptual losses, our aRGB space consistently improves overall metrics by reconstructing both color and local structures, overcoming the conventional perception-distortion trade-off.
Robust Model-based Face Reconstruction through Weakly-Supervised Outlier Segmentation
In this work, we aim to enhance model-based face reconstruction by avoiding fitting the model to outliers, i.e. regions that cannot be well-expressed by the model such as occluders or make-up. The core challenge for localizing outliers is that they are highly variable and difficult to annotate. To overcome this challenging problem, we introduce a joint Face-autoencoder and outlier segmentation approach (FOCUS).In particular, we exploit the fact that the outliers cannot be fitted well by the face model and hence can be localized well given a high-quality model fitting. The main challenge is that the model fitting and the outlier segmentation are mutually dependent on each other, and need to be inferred jointly. We resolve this chicken-and-egg problem with an EM-type training strategy, where a face autoencoder is trained jointly with an outlier segmentation network. This leads to a synergistic effect, in which the segmentation network prevents the face encoder from fitting to the outliers, enhancing the reconstruction quality. The improved 3D face reconstruction, in turn, enables the segmentation network to better predict the outliers. To resolve the ambiguity between outliers and regions that are difficult to fit, such as eyebrows, we build a statistical prior from synthetic data that measures the systematic bias in model fitting. Experiments on the NoW testset demonstrate that FOCUS achieves SOTA 3D face reconstruction performance among all baselines that are trained without 3D annotation. Moreover, our results on CelebA-HQ and the AR database show that the segmentation network can localize occluders accurately despite being trained without any segmentation annotation.
LookHere: Vision Transformers with Directed Attention Generalize and Extrapolate
High-resolution images offer more information about scenes that can improve model accuracy. However, the dominant model architecture in computer vision, the vision transformer (ViT), cannot effectively leverage larger images without finetuning -- ViTs poorly extrapolate to more patches at test time, although transformers offer sequence length flexibility. We attribute this shortcoming to the current patch position encoding methods, which create a distribution shift when extrapolating. We propose a drop-in replacement for the position encoding of plain ViTs that restricts attention heads to fixed fields of view, pointed in different directions, using 2D attention masks. Our novel method, called LookHere, provides translation-equivariance, ensures attention head diversity, and limits the distribution shift that attention heads face when extrapolating. We demonstrate that LookHere improves performance on classification (avg. 1.6%), against adversarial attack (avg. 5.4%), and decreases calibration error (avg. 1.5%) -- on ImageNet without extrapolation. With extrapolation, LookHere outperforms the current SoTA position encoding method, 2D-RoPE, by 21.7% on ImageNet when trained at 224^2 px and tested at 1024^2 px. Additionally, we release a high-resolution test set to improve the evaluation of high-resolution image classifiers, called ImageNet-HR.
UGainS: Uncertainty Guided Anomaly Instance Segmentation
A single unexpected object on the road can cause an accident or may lead to injuries. To prevent this, we need a reliable mechanism for finding anomalous objects on the road. This task, called anomaly segmentation, can be a stepping stone to safe and reliable autonomous driving. Current approaches tackle anomaly segmentation by assigning an anomaly score to each pixel and by grouping anomalous regions using simple heuristics. However, pixel grouping is a limiting factor when it comes to evaluating the segmentation performance of individual anomalous objects. To address the issue of grouping multiple anomaly instances into one, we propose an approach that produces accurate anomaly instance masks. Our approach centers on an out-of-distribution segmentation model for identifying uncertain regions and a strong generalist segmentation model for anomaly instances segmentation. We investigate ways to use uncertain regions to guide such a segmentation model to perform segmentation of anomalous instances. By incorporating strong object priors from a generalist model we additionally improve the per-pixel anomaly segmentation performance. Our approach outperforms current pixel-level anomaly segmentation methods, achieving an AP of 80.08% and 88.98% on the Fishyscapes Lost and Found and the RoadAnomaly validation sets respectively. Project page: https://vision.rwth-aachen.de/ugains
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.
Results and findings of the 2021 Image Similarity Challenge
The 2021 Image Similarity Challenge introduced a dataset to serve as a new benchmark to evaluate recent image copy detection methods. There were 200 participants to the competition. This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the top submissions. It appears that the most difficult image transformations involve either severe image crops or hiding into unrelated images, combined with local pixel perturbations. The key algorithmic elements in the winning submissions are: training on strong augmentations, self-supervised learning, score normalization, explicit overlay detection, and global descriptor matching followed by pairwise image comparison.
DoNet: Deep De-overlapping Network for Cytology Instance Segmentation
Cell instance segmentation in cytology images has significant importance for biology analysis and cancer screening, while remains challenging due to 1) the extensive overlapping translucent cell clusters that cause the ambiguous boundaries, and 2) the confusion of mimics and debris as nuclei. In this work, we proposed a De-overlapping Network (DoNet) in a decompose-and-recombined strategy. A Dual-path Region Segmentation Module (DRM) explicitly decomposes the cell clusters into intersection and complement regions, followed by a Semantic Consistency-guided Recombination Module (CRM) for integration. To further introduce the containment relationship of the nucleus in the cytoplasm, we design a Mask-guided Region Proposal Strategy (MRP) that integrates the cell attention maps for inner-cell instance prediction. We validate the proposed approach on ISBI2014 and CPS datasets. Experiments show that our proposed DoNet significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) cell instance segmentation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/DeepDoNet/DoNet.
WinCLIP: Zero-/Few-Shot Anomaly Classification and Segmentation
Visual anomaly classification and segmentation are vital for automating industrial quality inspection. The focus of prior research in the field has been on training custom models for each quality inspection task, which requires task-specific images and annotation. In this paper we move away from this regime, addressing zero-shot and few-normal-shot anomaly classification and segmentation. Recently CLIP, a vision-language model, has shown revolutionary generality with competitive zero-/few-shot performance in comparison to full-supervision. But CLIP falls short on anomaly classification and segmentation tasks. Hence, we propose window-based CLIP (WinCLIP) with (1) a compositional ensemble on state words and prompt templates and (2) efficient extraction and aggregation of window/patch/image-level features aligned with text. We also propose its few-normal-shot extension WinCLIP+, which uses complementary information from normal images. In MVTec-AD (and VisA), without further tuning, WinCLIP achieves 91.8%/85.1% (78.1%/79.6%) AUROC in zero-shot anomaly classification and segmentation while WinCLIP+ does 93.1%/95.2% (83.8%/96.4%) in 1-normal-shot, surpassing state-of-the-art by large margins.
AnomalyCLIP: Object-agnostic Prompt Learning for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) requires detection models trained using auxiliary data to detect anomalies without any training sample in a target dataset. It is a crucial task when training data is not accessible due to various concerns, eg, data privacy, yet it is challenging since the models need to generalize to anomalies across different domains where the appearance of foreground objects, abnormal regions, and background features, such as defects/tumors on different products/organs, can vary significantly. Recently large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated strong zero-shot recognition ability in various vision tasks, including anomaly detection. However, their ZSAD performance is weak since the VLMs focus more on modeling the class semantics of the foreground objects rather than the abnormality/normality in the images. In this paper we introduce a novel approach, namely AnomalyCLIP, to adapt CLIP for accurate ZSAD across different domains. The key insight of AnomalyCLIP is to learn object-agnostic text prompts that capture generic normality and abnormality in an image regardless of its foreground objects. This allows our model to focus on the abnormal image regions rather than the object semantics, enabling generalized normality and abnormality recognition on diverse types of objects. Large-scale experiments on 17 real-world anomaly detection datasets show that AnomalyCLIP achieves superior zero-shot performance of detecting and segmenting anomalies in datasets of highly diverse class semantics from various defect inspection and medical imaging domains. Code will be made available at https://github.com/zqhang/AnomalyCLIP.
FreeCompose: Generic Zero-Shot Image Composition with Diffusion Prior
We offer a novel approach to image composition, which integrates multiple input images into a single, coherent image. Rather than concentrating on specific use cases such as appearance editing (image harmonization) or semantic editing (semantic image composition), we showcase the potential of utilizing the powerful generative prior inherent in large-scale pre-trained diffusion models to accomplish generic image composition applicable to both scenarios. We observe that the pre-trained diffusion models automatically identify simple copy-paste boundary areas as low-density regions during denoising. Building on this insight, we propose to optimize the composed image towards high-density regions guided by the diffusion prior. In addition, we introduce a novel maskguided loss to further enable flexible semantic image composition. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our approach in achieving generic zero-shot image composition. Additionally, our approach shows promising potential in various tasks, such as object removal and multiconcept customization.
DeepFace-EMD: Re-ranking Using Patch-wise Earth Mover's Distance Improves Out-Of-Distribution Face Identification
Face identification (FI) is ubiquitous and drives many high-stake decisions made by law enforcement. State-of-the-art FI approaches compare two images by taking the cosine similarity between their image embeddings. Yet, such an approach suffers from poor out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization to new types of images (e.g., when a query face is masked, cropped, or rotated) not included in the training set or the gallery. Here, we propose a re-ranking approach that compares two faces using the Earth Mover's Distance on the deep, spatial features of image patches. Our extra comparison stage explicitly examines image similarity at a fine-grained level (e.g., eyes to eyes) and is more robust to OOD perturbations and occlusions than traditional FI. Interestingly, without finetuning feature extractors, our method consistently improves the accuracy on all tested OOD queries: masked, cropped, rotated, and adversarial while obtaining similar results on in-distribution images.
Super-High-Fidelity Image Compression via Hierarchical-ROI and Adaptive Quantization
Learned Image Compression (LIC) has achieved dramatic progress regarding objective and subjective metrics. MSE-based models aim to improve objective metrics while generative models are leveraged to improve visual quality measured by subjective metrics. However, they all suffer from blurring or deformation at low bit rates, especially at below 0.2bpp. Besides, deformation on human faces and text is unacceptable for visual quality assessment, and the problem becomes more prominent on small faces and text. To solve this problem, we combine the advantage of MSE-based models and generative models by utilizing region of interest (ROI). We propose Hierarchical-ROI (H-ROI), to split images into several foreground regions and one background region to improve the reconstruction of regions containing faces, text, and complex textures. Further, we propose adaptive quantization by non-linear mapping within the channel dimension to constrain the bit rate while maintaining the visual quality. Exhaustive experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve better visual quality on small faces and text with lower bit rates, e.g., 0.7X bits of HiFiC and 0.5X bits of BPG.
Computational Long Exposure Mobile Photography
Long exposure photography produces stunning imagery, representing moving elements in a scene with motion-blur. It is generally employed in two modalities, producing either a foreground or a background blur effect. Foreground blur images are traditionally captured on a tripod-mounted camera and portray blurred moving foreground elements, such as silky water or light trails, over a perfectly sharp background landscape. Background blur images, also called panning photography, are captured while the camera is tracking a moving subject, to produce an image of a sharp subject over a background blurred by relative motion. Both techniques are notoriously challenging and require additional equipment and advanced skills. In this paper, we describe a computational burst photography system that operates in a hand-held smartphone camera app, and achieves these effects fully automatically, at the tap of the shutter button. Our approach first detects and segments the salient subject. We track the scene motion over multiple frames and align the images in order to preserve desired sharpness and to produce aesthetically pleasing motion streaks. We capture an under-exposed burst and select the subset of input frames that will produce blur trails of controlled length, regardless of scene or camera motion velocity. We predict inter-frame motion and synthesize motion-blur to fill the temporal gaps between the input frames. Finally, we composite the blurred image with the sharp regular exposure to protect the sharpness of faces or areas of the scene that are barely moving, and produce a final high resolution and high dynamic range (HDR) photograph. Our system democratizes a capability previously reserved to professionals, and makes this creative style accessible to most casual photographers. More information and supplementary material can be found on our project webpage: https://motion-mode.github.io/
Inverse Painting: Reconstructing The Painting Process
Given an input painting, we reconstruct a time-lapse video of how it may have been painted. We formulate this as an autoregressive image generation problem, in which an initially blank "canvas" is iteratively updated. The model learns from real artists by training on many painting videos. Our approach incorporates text and region understanding to define a set of painting "instructions" and updates the canvas with a novel diffusion-based renderer. The method extrapolates beyond the limited, acrylic style paintings on which it has been trained, showing plausible results for a wide range of artistic styles and genres.
MuSc: Zero-Shot Industrial Anomaly Classification and Segmentation with Mutual Scoring of the Unlabeled Images
This paper studies zero-shot anomaly classification (AC) and segmentation (AS) in industrial vision. We reveal that the abundant normal and abnormal cues implicit in unlabeled test images can be exploited for anomaly determination, which is ignored by prior methods. Our key observation is that for the industrial product images, the normal image patches could find a relatively large number of similar patches in other unlabeled images, while the abnormal ones only have a few similar patches. We leverage such a discriminative characteristic to design a novel zero-shot AC/AS method by Mutual Scoring (MuSc) of the unlabeled images, which does not need any training or prompts. Specifically, we perform Local Neighborhood Aggregation with Multiple Degrees (LNAMD) to obtain the patch features that are capable of representing anomalies in varying sizes. Then we propose the Mutual Scoring Mechanism (MSM) to leverage the unlabeled test images to assign the anomaly score to each other. Furthermore, we present an optimization approach named Re-scoring with Constrained Image-level Neighborhood (RsCIN) for image-level anomaly classification to suppress the false positives caused by noises in normal images. The superior performance on the challenging MVTec AD and VisA datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. Compared with the state-of-the-art zero-shot approaches, MuSc achieves a 21.1% PRO absolute gain (from 72.7% to 93.8%) on MVTec AD, a 19.4% pixel-AP gain and a 14.7% pixel-AUROC gain on VisA. In addition, our zero-shot approach outperforms most of the few-shot approaches and is comparable to some one-class methods. Code is available at https://github.com/xrli-U/MuSc.
OneRestore: A Universal Restoration Framework for Composite Degradation
In real-world scenarios, image impairments often manifest as composite degradations, presenting a complex interplay of elements such as low light, haze, rain, and snow. Despite this reality, existing restoration methods typically target isolated degradation types, thereby falling short in environments where multiple degrading factors coexist. To bridge this gap, our study proposes a versatile imaging model that consolidates four physical corruption paradigms to accurately represent complex, composite degradation scenarios. In this context, we propose OneRestore, a novel transformer-based framework designed for adaptive, controllable scene restoration. The proposed framework leverages a unique cross-attention mechanism, merging degraded scene descriptors with image features, allowing for nuanced restoration. Our model allows versatile input scene descriptors, ranging from manual text embeddings to automatic extractions based on visual attributes. Our methodology is further enhanced through a composite degradation restoration loss, using extra degraded images as negative samples to fortify model constraints. Comparative results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate OneRestore as a superior solution, significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in addressing complex, composite degradations.
On the Robustness of Normalizing Flows for Inverse Problems in Imaging
Conditional normalizing flows can generate diverse image samples for solving inverse problems. Most normalizing flows for inverse problems in imaging employ the conditional affine coupling layer that can generate diverse images quickly. However, unintended severe artifacts are occasionally observed in the output of them. In this work, we address this critical issue by investigating the origins of these artifacts and proposing the conditions to avoid them. First of all, we empirically and theoretically reveal that these problems are caused by "exploding inverse" in the conditional affine coupling layer for certain out-of-distribution (OOD) conditional inputs. Then, we further validated that the probability of causing erroneous artifacts in pixels is highly correlated with a Mahalanobis distance-based OOD score for inverse problems in imaging. Lastly, based on our investigations, we propose a remark to avoid exploding inverse and then based on it, we suggest a simple remedy that substitutes the affine coupling layers with the modified rational quadratic spline coupling layers in normalizing flows, to encourage the robustness of generated image samples. Our experimental results demonstrated that our suggested methods effectively suppressed critical artifacts occurring in normalizing flows for super-resolution space generation and low-light image enhancement.
Towards Fewer Annotations: Active Learning via Region Impurity and Prediction Uncertainty for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
Self-training has greatly facilitated domain adaptive semantic segmentation, which iteratively generates pseudo labels on unlabeled target data and retrains the network. However, realistic segmentation datasets are highly imbalanced, pseudo labels are typically biased to the majority classes and basically noisy, leading to an error-prone and suboptimal model. In this paper, we propose a simple region-based active learning approach for semantic segmentation under a domain shift, aiming to automatically query a small partition of image regions to be labeled while maximizing segmentation performance. Our algorithm, Region Impurity and Prediction Uncertainty (RIPU), introduces a new acquisition strategy characterizing the spatial adjacency of image regions along with the prediction confidence. We show that the proposed region-based selection strategy makes more efficient use of a limited budget than image-based or point-based counterparts. Further, we enforce local prediction consistency between a pixel and its nearest neighbors on a source image. Alongside, we develop a negative learning loss to make the features more discriminative. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method only requires very few annotations to almost reach the supervised performance and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/BIT-DA/RIPU.
MSI: Maximize Support-Set Information for Few-Shot Segmentation
FSS(Few-shot segmentation) aims to segment a target class using a small number of labeled images (support set). To extract the information relevant to target class, a dominant approach in best performing FSS methods removes background features using a support mask. We observe that this feature excision through a limiting support mask introduces an information bottleneck in several challenging FSS cases, e.g., for small targets and/or inaccurate target boundaries. To this end, we present a novel method (MSI), which maximizes the support-set information by exploiting two complementary sources of features to generate super correlation maps. We validate the effectiveness of our approach by instantiating it into three recent and strong FSS methods. Experimental results on several publicly available FSS benchmarks show that our proposed method consistently improves the performance by visible margins and leads to faster convergence. Our code and models will be publicly released.
Back to the Feature: Classical 3D Features are (Almost) All You Need for 3D Anomaly Detection
Despite significant advances in image anomaly detection and segmentation, few methods use 3D information. We utilize a recently introduced 3D anomaly detection dataset to evaluate whether or not using 3D information is a lost opportunity. First, we present a surprising finding: standard color-only methods outperform all current methods that are explicitly designed to exploit 3D information. This is counter-intuitive as even a simple inspection of the dataset shows that color-only methods are insufficient for images containing geometric anomalies. This motivates the question: how can anomaly detection methods effectively use 3D information? We investigate a range of shape representations including hand-crafted and deep-learning-based; we demonstrate that rotation invariance plays the leading role in the performance. We uncover a simple 3D-only method that beats all recent approaches while not using deep learning, external pre-training datasets, or color information. As the 3D-only method cannot detect color and texture anomalies, we combine it with color-based features, significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art. Our method, dubbed BTF (Back to the Feature) achieves pixel-wise ROCAUC: 99.3% and PRO: 96.4% on MVTec 3D-AD.
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
Extrapolated Urban View Synthesis Benchmark
Photorealistic simulators are essential for the training and evaluation of vision-centric autonomous vehicles (AVs). At their core is Novel View Synthesis (NVS), a crucial capability that generates diverse unseen viewpoints to accommodate the broad and continuous pose distribution of AVs. Recent advances in radiance fields, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting, achieve photorealistic rendering at real-time speeds and have been widely used in modeling large-scale driving scenes. However, their performance is commonly evaluated using an interpolated setup with highly correlated training and test views. In contrast, extrapolation, where test views largely deviate from training views, remains underexplored, limiting progress in generalizable simulation technology. To address this gap, we leverage publicly available AV datasets with multiple traversals, multiple vehicles, and multiple cameras to build the first Extrapolated Urban View Synthesis (EUVS) benchmark. Meanwhile, we conduct quantitative and qualitative evaluations of state-of-the-art Gaussian Splatting methods across different difficulty levels. Our results show that Gaussian Splatting is prone to overfitting to training views. Besides, incorporating diffusion priors and improving geometry cannot fundamentally improve NVS under large view changes, highlighting the need for more robust approaches and large-scale training. We have released our data to help advance self-driving and urban robotics simulation technology.
Structural Multiplane Image: Bridging Neural View Synthesis and 3D Reconstruction
The Multiplane Image (MPI), containing a set of fronto-parallel RGBA layers, is an effective and efficient representation for view synthesis from sparse inputs. Yet, its fixed structure limits the performance, especially for surfaces imaged at oblique angles. We introduce the Structural MPI (S-MPI), where the plane structure approximates 3D scenes concisely. Conveying RGBA contexts with geometrically-faithful structures, the S-MPI directly bridges view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. It can not only overcome the critical limitations of MPI, i.e., discretization artifacts from sloped surfaces and abuse of redundant layers, and can also acquire planar 3D reconstruction. Despite the intuition and demand of applying S-MPI, great challenges are introduced, e.g., high-fidelity approximation for both RGBA layers and plane poses, multi-view consistency, non-planar regions modeling, and efficient rendering with intersected planes. Accordingly, we propose a transformer-based network based on a segmentation model. It predicts compact and expressive S-MPI layers with their corresponding masks, poses, and RGBA contexts. Non-planar regions are inclusively handled as a special case in our unified framework. Multi-view consistency is ensured by sharing global proxy embeddings, which encode plane-level features covering the complete 3D scenes with aligned coordinates. Intensive experiments show that our method outperforms both previous state-of-the-art MPI-based view synthesis methods and planar reconstruction methods.
Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Pattern-Generalizable Image Corruption Detection
Effective image restoration with large-size corruptions, such as blind image inpainting, entails precise detection of corruption region masks which remains extremely challenging due to diverse shapes and patterns of corruptions. In this work, we present a novel method for automatic corruption detection, which allows for blind corruption restoration without known corruption masks. Specifically, we develop a hierarchical contrastive learning framework to detect corrupted regions by capturing the intrinsic semantic distinctions between corrupted and uncorrupted regions. In particular, our model detects the corrupted mask in a coarse-to-fine manner by first predicting a coarse mask by contrastive learning in low-resolution feature space and then refines the uncertain area of the mask by high-resolution contrastive learning. A specialized hierarchical interaction mechanism is designed to facilitate the knowledge propagation of contrastive learning in different scales, boosting the modeling performance substantially. The detected multi-scale corruption masks are then leveraged to guide the corruption restoration. Detecting corrupted regions by learning the contrastive distinctions rather than the semantic patterns of corruptions, our model has well generalization ability across different corruption patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate following merits of our model: 1) the superior performance over other methods on both corruption detection and various image restoration tasks including blind inpainting and watermark removal, and 2) strong generalization across different corruption patterns such as graffiti, random noise or other image content. Codes and trained weights are available at https://github.com/xyfJASON/HCL .
Adaptive Correspondence Scoring for Unsupervised Medical Image Registration
We propose an adaptive training scheme for unsupervised medical image registration. Existing methods rely on image reconstruction as the primary supervision signal. However, nuisance variables (e.g. noise and covisibility), violation of the Lambertian assumption in physical waves (e.g. ultrasound), and inconsistent image acquisition can all cause a loss of correspondence between medical images. As the unsupervised learning scheme relies on intensity constancy between images to establish correspondence for reconstruction, this introduces spurious error residuals that are not modeled by the typical training objective. To mitigate this, we propose an adaptive framework that re-weights the error residuals with a correspondence scoring map during training, preventing the parametric displacement estimator from drifting away due to noisy gradients, which leads to performance degradation. To illustrate the versatility and effectiveness of our method, we tested our framework on three representative registration architectures across three medical image datasets along with other baselines. Our adaptive framework consistently outperforms other methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Paired t-tests show that our improvements are statistically significant. Code available at: https://voldemort108x.github.io/AdaCS/.
Blind Inpainting with Object-aware Discrimination for Artificial Marker Removal
Medical images often contain artificial markers added by doctors, which can negatively affect the accuracy of AI-based diagnosis. To address this issue and recover the missing visual contents, inpainting techniques are highly needed. However, existing inpainting methods require manual mask input, limiting their application scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel blind inpainting method that automatically completes visual contents without specifying masks for target areas in an image. Our proposed model includes a mask-free reconstruction network and an object-aware discriminator. The reconstruction network consists of two branches that predict the corrupted regions with artificial markers and simultaneously recover the missing visual contents. The object-aware discriminator relies on the powerful recognition capabilities of the dense object detector to ensure that the markers of reconstructed images cannot be detected in any local regions. As a result, the reconstructed image can be close to the clean one as much as possible. Our proposed method is evaluated on different medical image datasets, covering multiple imaging modalities such as ultrasound (US), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and electron microscopy (EM), demonstrating that our method is effective and robust against various unknown missing region patterns.
UHD-IQA Benchmark Database: Pushing the Boundaries of Blind Photo Quality Assessment
We introduce a novel Image Quality Assessment (IQA) dataset comprising 6073 UHD-1 (4K) images, annotated at a fixed width of 3840 pixels. Contrary to existing No-Reference (NR) IQA datasets, ours focuses on highly aesthetic photos of high technical quality, filling a gap in the literature. The images, carefully curated to exclude synthetic content, are sufficiently diverse to train general NR-IQA models. Importantly, the dataset is annotated with perceptual quality ratings obtained through a crowdsourcing study. Ten expert raters, comprising photographers and graphics artists, assessed each image at least twice in multiple sessions spanning several days, resulting in 20 highly reliable ratings per image. Annotators were rigorously selected based on several metrics, including self-consistency, to ensure their reliability. The dataset includes rich metadata with user and machine-generated tags from over 5,000 categories and popularity indicators such as favorites, likes, downloads, and views. With its unique characteristics, such as its focus on high-quality images, reliable crowdsourced annotations, and high annotation resolution, our dataset opens up new opportunities for advancing perceptual image quality assessment research and developing practical NR-IQA models that apply to modern photos. Our dataset is available at https://database.mmsp-kn.de/uhd-iqa-benchmark-database.html
Generative Photomontage
Text-to-image models are powerful tools for image creation. However, the generation process is akin to a dice roll and makes it difficult to achieve a single image that captures everything a user wants. In this paper, we propose a framework for creating the desired image by compositing it from various parts of generated images, in essence forming a Generative Photomontage. Given a stack of images generated by ControlNet using the same input condition and different seeds, we let users select desired parts from the generated results using a brush stroke interface. We introduce a novel technique that takes in the user's brush strokes, segments the generated images using a graph-based optimization in diffusion feature space, and then composites the segmented regions via a new feature-space blending method. Our method faithfully preserves the user-selected regions while compositing them harmoniously. We demonstrate that our flexible framework can be used for many applications, including generating new appearance combinations, fixing incorrect shapes and artifacts, and improving prompt alignment. We show compelling results for each application and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing image blending methods and various baselines.
LEDITS++: Limitless Image Editing using Text-to-Image Models
Text-to-image diffusion models have recently received increasing interest for their astonishing ability to produce high-fidelity images from solely text inputs. Subsequent research efforts aim to exploit and apply their capabilities to real image editing. However, existing image-to-image methods are often inefficient, imprecise, and of limited versatility. They either require time-consuming fine-tuning, deviate unnecessarily strongly from the input image, and/or lack support for multiple, simultaneous edits. To address these issues, we introduce LEDITS++, an efficient yet versatile and precise textual image manipulation technique. LEDITS++'s novel inversion approach requires no tuning nor optimization and produces high-fidelity results with a few diffusion steps. Second, our methodology supports multiple simultaneous edits and is architecture-agnostic. Third, we use a novel implicit masking technique that limits changes to relevant image regions. We propose the novel TEdBench++ benchmark as part of our exhaustive evaluation. Our results demonstrate the capabilities of LEDITS++ and its improvements over previous methods. The project page is available at https://leditsplusplus-project.static.hf.space .
Diffusion Sampling with Momentum for Mitigating Divergence Artifacts
Despite the remarkable success of diffusion models in image generation, slow sampling remains a persistent issue. To accelerate the sampling process, prior studies have reformulated diffusion sampling as an ODE/SDE and introduced higher-order numerical methods. However, these methods often produce divergence artifacts, especially with a low number of sampling steps, which limits the achievable acceleration. In this paper, we investigate the potential causes of these artifacts and suggest that the small stability regions of these methods could be the principal cause. To address this issue, we propose two novel techniques. The first technique involves the incorporation of Heavy Ball (HB) momentum, a well-known technique for improving optimization, into existing diffusion numerical methods to expand their stability regions. We also prove that the resulting methods have first-order convergence. The second technique, called Generalized Heavy Ball (GHVB), constructs a new high-order method that offers a variable trade-off between accuracy and artifact suppression. Experimental results show that our techniques are highly effective in reducing artifacts and improving image quality, surpassing state-of-the-art diffusion solvers on both pixel-based and latent-based diffusion models for low-step sampling. Our research provides novel insights into the design of numerical methods for future diffusion work.
CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features
Regional dropout strategies have been proposed to enhance the performance of convolutional neural network classifiers. They have proved to be effective for guiding the model to attend on less discriminative parts of objects (e.g. leg as opposed to head of a person), thereby letting the network generalize better and have better object localization capabilities. On the other hand, current methods for regional dropout remove informative pixels on training images by overlaying a patch of either black pixels or random noise. Such removal is not desirable because it leads to information loss and inefficiency during training. We therefore propose the CutMix augmentation strategy: patches are cut and pasted among training images where the ground truth labels are also mixed proportionally to the area of the patches. By making efficient use of training pixels and retaining the regularization effect of regional dropout, CutMix consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art augmentation strategies on CIFAR and ImageNet classification tasks, as well as on the ImageNet weakly-supervised localization task. Moreover, unlike previous augmentation methods, our CutMix-trained ImageNet classifier, when used as a pretrained model, results in consistent performance gains in Pascal detection and MS-COCO image captioning benchmarks. We also show that CutMix improves the model robustness against input corruptions and its out-of-distribution detection performances. Source code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/clovaai/CutMix-PyTorch .
High-Resolution Virtual Try-On with Misalignment and Occlusion-Handled Conditions
Image-based virtual try-on aims to synthesize an image of a person wearing a given clothing item. To solve the task, the existing methods warp the clothing item to fit the person's body and generate the segmentation map of the person wearing the item before fusing the item with the person. However, when the warping and the segmentation generation stages operate individually without information exchange, the misalignment between the warped clothes and the segmentation map occurs, which leads to the artifacts in the final image. The information disconnection also causes excessive warping near the clothing regions occluded by the body parts, so-called pixel-squeezing artifacts. To settle the issues, we propose a novel try-on condition generator as a unified module of the two stages (i.e., warping and segmentation generation stages). A newly proposed feature fusion block in the condition generator implements the information exchange, and the condition generator does not create any misalignment or pixel-squeezing artifacts. We also introduce discriminator rejection that filters out the incorrect segmentation map predictions and assures the performance of virtual try-on frameworks. Experiments on a high-resolution dataset demonstrate that our model successfully handles the misalignment and occlusion, and significantly outperforms the baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/sangyun884/HR-VITON.
Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement
We present an approach to enhancing the realism of synthetic images. The images are enhanced by a convolutional network that leverages intermediate representations produced by conventional rendering pipelines. The network is trained via a novel adversarial objective, which provides strong supervision at multiple perceptual levels. We analyze scene layout distributions in commonly used datasets and find that they differ in important ways. We hypothesize that this is one of the causes of strong artifacts that can be observed in the results of many prior methods. To address this we propose a new strategy for sampling image patches during training. We also introduce multiple architectural improvements in the deep network modules used for photorealism enhancement. We confirm the benefits of our contributions in controlled experiments and report substantial gains in stability and realism in comparison to recent image-to-image translation methods and a variety of other baselines.
Counterfactual Visual Explanations
In this work, we develop a technique to produce counterfactual visual explanations. Given a 'query' image I for which a vision system predicts class c, a counterfactual visual explanation identifies how I could change such that the system would output a different specified class c'. To do this, we select a 'distractor' image I' that the system predicts as class c' and identify spatial regions in I and I' such that replacing the identified region in I with the identified region in I' would push the system towards classifying I as c'. We apply our approach to multiple image classification datasets generating qualitative results showcasing the interpretability and discriminativeness of our counterfactual explanations. To explore the effectiveness of our explanations in teaching humans, we present machine teaching experiments for the task of fine-grained bird classification. We find that users trained to distinguish bird species fare better when given access to counterfactual explanations in addition to training examples.
Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting
Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting has demonstrated impressive novel view synthesis results, reaching high fidelity and efficiency. However, strong artifacts can be observed when changing the sampling rate, \eg, by changing focal length or camera distance. We find that the source for this phenomenon can be attributed to the lack of 3D frequency constraints and the usage of a 2D dilation filter. To address this problem, we introduce a 3D smoothing filter which constrains the size of the 3D Gaussian primitives based on the maximal sampling frequency induced by the input views, eliminating high-frequency artifacts when zooming in. Moreover, replacing 2D dilation with a 2D Mip filter, which simulates a 2D box filter, effectively mitigates aliasing and dilation issues. Our evaluation, including scenarios such a training on single-scale images and testing on multiple scales, validates the effectiveness of our approach.
xView: Objects in Context in Overhead Imagery
We introduce a new large-scale dataset for the advancement of object detection techniques and overhead object detection research. This satellite imagery dataset enables research progress pertaining to four key computer vision frontiers. We utilize a novel process for geospatial category detection and bounding box annotation with three stages of quality control. Our data is collected from WorldView-3 satellites at 0.3m ground sample distance, providing higher resolution imagery than most public satellite imagery datasets. We compare xView to other object detection datasets in both natural and overhead imagery domains and then provide a baseline analysis using the Single Shot MultiBox Detector. xView is one of the largest and most diverse publicly available object-detection datasets to date, with over 1 million objects across 60 classes in over 1,400 km^2 of imagery.
RaVL: Discovering and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Fine-Tuned Vision-Language Models
Fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) often capture spurious correlations between image features and textual attributes, resulting in degraded zero-shot performance at test time. Existing approaches for addressing spurious correlations (i) primarily operate at the global image-level rather than intervening directly on fine-grained image features and (ii) are predominantly designed for unimodal settings. In this work, we present RaVL, which takes a fine-grained perspective on VLM robustness by discovering and mitigating spurious correlations using local image features rather than operating at the global image level. Given a fine-tuned VLM, RaVL first discovers spurious correlations by leveraging a region-level clustering approach to identify precise image features contributing to zero-shot classification errors. Then, RaVL mitigates the identified spurious correlation with a novel region-aware loss function that enables the VLM to focus on relevant regions and ignore spurious relationships during fine-tuning. We evaluate RaVL on 654 VLMs with various model architectures, data domains, and learned spurious correlations. Our results show that RaVL accurately discovers (191% improvement over the closest baseline) and mitigates (8.2% improvement on worst-group image classification accuracy) spurious correlations. Qualitative evaluations on general-domain and medical-domain VLMs confirm our findings.
Deep Generative Adversarial Network for Occlusion Removal from a Single Image
Nowadays, the enhanced capabilities of in-expensive imaging devices have led to a tremendous increase in the acquisition and sharing of multimedia content over the Internet. Despite advances in imaging sensor technology, annoying conditions like occlusions hamper photography and may deteriorate the performance of applications such as surveillance, detection, and recognition. Occlusion segmentation is difficult because of scale variations, illumination changes, and so on. Similarly, recovering a scene from foreground occlusions also poses significant challenges due to the complexity of accurately estimating the occluded regions and maintaining coherence with the surrounding context. In particular, image de-fencing presents its own set of challenges because of the diverse variations in shape, texture, color, patterns, and the often cluttered environment. This study focuses on the automatic detection and removal of occlusions from a single image. We propose a fully automatic, two-stage convolutional neural network for fence segmentation and occlusion completion. We leverage generative adversarial networks (GANs) to synthesize realistic content, including both structure and texture, in a single shot for inpainting. To assess zero-shot generalization, we evaluated our trained occlusion detection model on our proposed fence-like occlusion segmentation dataset. The dataset can be found on GitHub.
Watch Your Steps: Local Image and Scene Editing by Text Instructions
Denoising diffusion models have enabled high-quality image generation and editing. We present a method to localize the desired edit region implicit in a text instruction. We leverage InstructPix2Pix (IP2P) and identify the discrepancy between IP2P predictions with and without the instruction. This discrepancy is referred to as the relevance map. The relevance map conveys the importance of changing each pixel to achieve the edits, and is used to to guide the modifications. This guidance ensures that the irrelevant pixels remain unchanged. Relevance maps are further used to enhance the quality of text-guided editing of 3D scenes in the form of neural radiance fields. A field is trained on relevance maps of training views, denoted as the relevance field, defining the 3D region within which modifications should be made. We perform iterative updates on the training views guided by rendered relevance maps from the relevance field. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both image and NeRF editing tasks. Project page: https://ashmrz.github.io/WatchYourSteps/
Tuning-Free Image Customization with Image and Text Guidance
Despite significant advancements in image customization with diffusion models, current methods still have several limitations: 1) unintended changes in non-target areas when regenerating the entire image; 2) guidance solely by a reference image or text descriptions; and 3) time-consuming fine-tuning, which limits their practical application. In response, we introduce a tuning-free framework for simultaneous text-image-guided image customization, enabling precise editing of specific image regions within seconds. Our approach preserves the semantic features of the reference image subject while allowing modification of detailed attributes based on text descriptions. To achieve this, we propose an innovative attention blending strategy that blends self-attention features in the UNet decoder during the denoising process. To our knowledge, this is the first tuning-free method that concurrently utilizes text and image guidance for image customization in specific regions. Our approach outperforms previous methods in both human and quantitative evaluations, providing an efficient solution for various practical applications, such as image synthesis, design, and creative photography.
DeepOrgan: Multi-level Deep Convolutional Networks for Automated Pancreas Segmentation
Automatic organ segmentation is an important yet challenging problem for medical image analysis. The pancreas is an abdominal organ with very high anatomical variability. This inhibits previous segmentation methods from achieving high accuracies, especially compared to other organs such as the liver, heart or kidneys. In this paper, we present a probabilistic bottom-up approach for pancreas segmentation in abdominal computed tomography (CT) scans, using multi-level deep convolutional networks (ConvNets). We propose and evaluate several variations of deep ConvNets in the context of hierarchical, coarse-to-fine classification on image patches and regions, i.e. superpixels. We first present a dense labeling of local image patches via P{-}ConvNet and nearest neighbor fusion. Then we describe a regional ConvNet (R_1{-}ConvNet) that samples a set of bounding boxes around each image superpixel at different scales of contexts in a "zoom-out" fashion. Our ConvNets learn to assign class probabilities for each superpixel region of being pancreas. Last, we study a stacked R_2{-}ConvNet leveraging the joint space of CT intensities and the P{-}ConvNet dense probability maps. Both 3D Gaussian smoothing and 2D conditional random fields are exploited as structured predictions for post-processing. We evaluate on CT images of 82 patients in 4-fold cross-validation. We achieve a Dice Similarity Coefficient of 83.6pm6.3% in training and 71.8pm10.7% in testing.
Foreground-aware Image Inpainting
Existing image inpainting methods typically fill holes by borrowing information from surrounding pixels. They often produce unsatisfactory results when the holes overlap with or touch foreground objects due to lack of information about the actual extent of foreground and background regions within the holes. These scenarios, however, are very important in practice, especially for applications such as the removal of distracting objects. To address the problem, we propose a foreground-aware image inpainting system that explicitly disentangles structure inference and content completion. Specifically, our model learns to predict the foreground contour first, and then inpaints the missing region using the predicted contour as guidance. We show that by such disentanglement, the contour completion model predicts reasonable contours of objects, and further substantially improves the performance of image inpainting. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods and achieves superior inpainting results on challenging cases with complex compositions.
AUPIMO: Redefining Visual Anomaly Detection Benchmarks with High Speed and Low Tolerance
Recent advances in visual anomaly detection research have seen AUROC and AUPRO scores on public benchmark datasets such as MVTec and VisA converge towards perfect recall, giving the impression that these benchmarks are near-solved. However, high AUROC and AUPRO scores do not always reflect qualitative performance, which limits the validity of these metrics in real-world applications. We argue that the artificial ceiling imposed by the lack of an adequate evaluation metric restrains progression of the field, and it is crucial that we revisit the evaluation metrics used to rate our algorithms. In response, we introduce Per-IMage Overlap (PIMO), a novel metric that addresses the shortcomings of AUROC and AUPRO. PIMO retains the recall-based nature of the existing metrics but introduces two distinctions: the assignment of curves (and respective area under the curve) is per-image, and its X-axis relies solely on normal images. Measuring recall per image simplifies instance score indexing and is more robust to noisy annotations. As we show, it also accelerates computation and enables the usage of statistical tests to compare models. By imposing low tolerance for false positives on normal images, PIMO provides an enhanced model validation procedure and highlights performance variations across datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that PIMO offers practical advantages and nuanced performance insights that redefine anomaly detection benchmarks -- notably challenging the perception that MVTec AD and VisA datasets have been solved by contemporary models. Available on GitHub: https://github.com/jpcbertoldo/aupimo.
InterFormer: Real-time Interactive Image Segmentation
Interactive image segmentation enables annotators to efficiently perform pixel-level annotation for segmentation tasks. However, the existing interactive segmentation pipeline suffers from inefficient computations of interactive models because of the following two issues. First, annotators' later click is based on models' feedback of annotators' former click. This serial interaction is unable to utilize model's parallelism capabilities. Second, in each interaction step, the model handles the invariant image along with the sparse variable clicks, resulting in a process that's highly repetitive and redundant. For efficient computations, we propose a method named InterFormer that follows a new pipeline to address these issues. InterFormer extracts and preprocesses the computationally time-consuming part i.e. image processing from the existing process. Specifically, InterFormer employs a large vision transformer (ViT) on high-performance devices to preprocess images in parallel, and then uses a lightweight module called interactive multi-head self attention (I-MSA) for interactive segmentation. Furthermore, the I-MSA module's deployment on low-power devices extends the practical application of interactive segmentation. The I-MSA module utilizes the preprocessed features to efficiently response to the annotator inputs in real-time. The experiments on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of InterFormer, which outperforms previous interactive segmentation models in terms of computational efficiency and segmentation quality, achieve real-time high-quality interactive segmentation on CPU-only devices. The code is available at https://github.com/YouHuang67/InterFormer.
FeatEnHancer: Enhancing Hierarchical Features for Object Detection and Beyond Under Low-Light Vision
Extracting useful visual cues for the downstream tasks is especially challenging under low-light vision. Prior works create enhanced representations by either correlating visual quality with machine perception or designing illumination-degrading transformation methods that require pre-training on synthetic datasets. We argue that optimizing enhanced image representation pertaining to the loss of the downstream task can result in more expressive representations. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel module, FeatEnHancer, that hierarchically combines multiscale features using multiheaded attention guided by task-related loss function to create suitable representations. Furthermore, our intra-scale enhancement improves the quality of features extracted at each scale or level, as well as combines features from different scales in a way that reflects their relative importance for the task at hand. FeatEnHancer is a general-purpose plug-and-play module and can be incorporated into any low-light vision pipeline. We show with extensive experimentation that the enhanced representation produced with FeatEnHancer significantly and consistently improves results in several low-light vision tasks, including dark object detection (+5.7 mAP on ExDark), face detection (+1.5 mAPon DARK FACE), nighttime semantic segmentation (+5.1 mIoU on ACDC ), and video object detection (+1.8 mAP on DarkVision), highlighting the effectiveness of enhancing hierarchical features under low-light vision.
Learning Global-aware Kernel for Image Harmonization
Image harmonization aims to solve the visual inconsistency problem in composited images by adaptively adjusting the foreground pixels with the background as references. Existing methods employ local color transformation or region matching between foreground and background, which neglects powerful proximity prior and independently distinguishes fore-/back-ground as a whole part for harmonization. As a result, they still show a limited performance across varied foreground objects and scenes. To address this issue, we propose a novel Global-aware Kernel Network (GKNet) to harmonize local regions with comprehensive consideration of long-distance background references. Specifically, GKNet includes two parts, \ie, harmony kernel prediction and harmony kernel modulation branches. The former includes a Long-distance Reference Extractor (LRE) to obtain long-distance context and Kernel Prediction Blocks (KPB) to predict multi-level harmony kernels by fusing global information with local features. To achieve this goal, a novel Selective Correlation Fusion (SCF) module is proposed to better select relevant long-distance background references for local harmonization. The latter employs the predicted kernels to harmonize foreground regions with both local and global awareness. Abundant experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method for image harmonization over state-of-the-art methods, \eg, achieving 39.53dB PSNR that surpasses the best counterpart by +0.78dB uparrow; decreasing fMSE/MSE by 11.5\%downarrow/6.7\%downarrow compared with the SoTA method. Code will be available at https://github.com/XintianShen/GKNet{here}.
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.
Semantic Amodal Segmentation
Common visual recognition tasks such as classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation are rapidly reaching maturity, and given the recent rate of progress, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that techniques for many of these problems will approach human levels of performance in the next few years. In this paper we look to the future: what is the next frontier in visual recognition? We offer one possible answer to this question. We propose a detailed image annotation that captures information beyond the visible pixels and requires complex reasoning about full scene structure. Specifically, we create an amodal segmentation of each image: the full extent of each region is marked, not just the visible pixels. Annotators outline and name all salient regions in the image and specify a partial depth order. The result is a rich scene structure, including visible and occluded portions of each region, figure-ground edge information, semantic labels, and object overlap. We create two datasets for semantic amodal segmentation. First, we label 500 images in the BSDS dataset with multiple annotators per image, allowing us to study the statistics of human annotations. We show that the proposed full scene annotation is surprisingly consistent between annotators, including for regions and edges. Second, we annotate 5000 images from COCO. This larger dataset allows us to explore a number of algorithmic ideas for amodal segmentation and depth ordering. We introduce novel metrics for these tasks, and along with our strong baselines, define concrete new challenges for the community.
Layout Aware Inpainting for Automated Furniture Removal in Indoor Scenes
We address the problem of detecting and erasing furniture from a wide angle photograph of a room. Inpainting large regions of an indoor scene often results in geometric inconsistencies of background elements within the inpaint mask. To address this problem, we utilize perceptual information (e.g. instance segmentation, and room layout) to produce a geometrically consistent empty version of a room. We share important details to make this system viable, such as per-plane inpainting, automatic rectification, and texture refinement. We provide detailed ablation along with qualitative examples, justifying our design choices. We show an application of our system by removing real furniture from a room and redecorating it with virtual furniture.
RbA: Segmenting Unknown Regions Rejected by All
Standard semantic segmentation models owe their success to curated datasets with a fixed set of semantic categories, without contemplating the possibility of identifying unknown objects from novel categories. Existing methods in outlier detection suffer from a lack of smoothness and objectness in their predictions, due to limitations of the per-pixel classification paradigm. Furthermore, additional training for detecting outliers harms the performance of known classes. In this paper, we explore another paradigm with region-level classification to better segment unknown objects. We show that the object queries in mask classification tend to behave like one \vs all classifiers. Based on this finding, we propose a novel outlier scoring function called RbA by defining the event of being an outlier as being rejected by all known classes. Our extensive experiments show that mask classification improves the performance of the existing outlier detection methods, and the best results are achieved with the proposed RbA. We also propose an objective to optimize RbA using minimal outlier supervision. Further fine-tuning with outliers improves the unknown performance, and unlike previous methods, it does not degrade the inlier performance.
BeyondScene: Higher-Resolution Human-Centric Scene Generation With Pretrained Diffusion
Generating higher-resolution human-centric scenes with details and controls remains a challenge for existing text-to-image diffusion models. This challenge stems from limited training image size, text encoder capacity (limited tokens), and the inherent difficulty of generating complex scenes involving multiple humans. While current methods attempted to address training size limit only, they often yielded human-centric scenes with severe artifacts. We propose BeyondScene, a novel framework that overcomes prior limitations, generating exquisite higher-resolution (over 8K) human-centric scenes with exceptional text-image correspondence and naturalness using existing pretrained diffusion models. BeyondScene employs a staged and hierarchical approach to initially generate a detailed base image focusing on crucial elements in instance creation for multiple humans and detailed descriptions beyond token limit of diffusion model, and then to seamlessly convert the base image to a higher-resolution output, exceeding training image size and incorporating details aware of text and instances via our novel instance-aware hierarchical enlargement process that consists of our proposed high-frequency injected forward diffusion and adaptive joint diffusion. BeyondScene surpasses existing methods in terms of correspondence with detailed text descriptions and naturalness, paving the way for advanced applications in higher-resolution human-centric scene creation beyond the capacity of pretrained diffusion models without costly retraining. Project page: https://janeyeon.github.io/beyond-scene.
SAM-Med2D
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a state-of-the-art research advancement in natural image segmentation, achieving impressive results with input prompts such as points and bounding boxes. However, our evaluation and recent research indicate that directly applying the pretrained SAM to medical image segmentation does not yield satisfactory performance. This limitation primarily arises from significant domain gap between natural images and medical images. To bridge this gap, we introduce SAM-Med2D, the most comprehensive studies on applying SAM to medical 2D images. Specifically, we first collect and curate approximately 4.6M images and 19.7M masks from public and private datasets, constructing a large-scale medical image segmentation dataset encompassing various modalities and objects. Then, we comprehensively fine-tune SAM on this dataset and turn it into SAM-Med2D. Unlike previous methods that only adopt bounding box or point prompts as interactive segmentation approach, we adapt SAM to medical image segmentation through more comprehensive prompts involving bounding boxes, points, and masks. We additionally fine-tune the encoder and decoder of the original SAM to obtain a well-performed SAM-Med2D, leading to the most comprehensive fine-tuning strategies to date. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation and analysis to investigate the performance of SAM-Med2D in medical image segmentation across various modalities, anatomical structures, and organs. Concurrently, we validated the generalization capability of SAM-Med2D on 9 datasets from MICCAI 2023 challenge. Overall, our approach demonstrated significantly superior performance and generalization capability compared to SAM.
SAIR: Learning Semantic-aware Implicit Representation
Implicit representation of an image can map arbitrary coordinates in the continuous domain to their corresponding color values, presenting a powerful capability for image reconstruction. Nevertheless, existing implicit representation approaches only focus on building continuous appearance mapping, ignoring the continuities of the semantic information across pixels. As a result, they can hardly achieve desired reconstruction results when the semantic information within input images is corrupted, for example, a large region misses. To address the issue, we propose to learn semantic-aware implicit representation (SAIR), that is, we make the implicit representation of each pixel rely on both its appearance and semantic information (\eg, which object does the pixel belong to). To this end, we propose a framework with two modules: (1) building a semantic implicit representation (SIR) for a corrupted image whose large regions miss. Given an arbitrary coordinate in the continuous domain, we can obtain its respective text-aligned embedding indicating the object the pixel belongs. (2) building an appearance implicit representation (AIR) based on the SIR. Given an arbitrary coordinate in the continuous domain, we can reconstruct its color whether or not the pixel is missed in the input. We validate the novel semantic-aware implicit representation method on the image inpainting task, and the extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin.
AutoSAM: Adapting SAM to Medical Images by Overloading the Prompt Encoder
The recently introduced Segment Anything Model (SAM) combines a clever architecture and large quantities of training data to obtain remarkable image segmentation capabilities. However, it fails to reproduce such results for Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) domains such as medical images. Moreover, while SAM is conditioned on either a mask or a set of points, it may be desirable to have a fully automatic solution. In this work, we replace SAM's conditioning with an encoder that operates on the same input image. By adding this encoder and without further fine-tuning SAM, we obtain state-of-the-art results on multiple medical images and video benchmarks. This new encoder is trained via gradients provided by a frozen SAM. For inspecting the knowledge within it, and providing a lightweight segmentation solution, we also learn to decode it into a mask by a shallow deconvolution network.
Medical Image Segmentation with SAM-generated Annotations
The field of medical image segmentation is hindered by the scarcity of large, publicly available annotated datasets. Not all datasets are made public for privacy reasons, and creating annotations for a large dataset is time-consuming and expensive, as it requires specialized expertise to accurately identify regions of interest (ROIs) within the images. To address these challenges, we evaluate the performance of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) as an annotation tool for medical data by using it to produce so-called "pseudo labels" on the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) computed tomography (CT) tasks. The pseudo labels are then used in place of ground truth labels to train a UNet model in a weakly-supervised manner. We experiment with different prompt types on SAM and find that the bounding box prompt is a simple yet effective method for generating pseudo labels. This method allows us to develop a weakly-supervised model that performs comparably to a fully supervised model.
AnyStar: Domain randomized universal star-convex 3D instance segmentation
Star-convex shapes arise across bio-microscopy and radiology in the form of nuclei, nodules, metastases, and other units. Existing instance segmentation networks for such structures train on densely labeled instances for each dataset, which requires substantial and often impractical manual annotation effort. Further, significant reengineering or finetuning is needed when presented with new datasets and imaging modalities due to changes in contrast, shape, orientation, resolution, and density. We present AnyStar, a domain-randomized generative model that simulates synthetic training data of blob-like objects with randomized appearance, environments, and imaging physics to train general-purpose star-convex instance segmentation networks. As a result, networks trained using our generative model do not require annotated images from unseen datasets. A single network trained on our synthesized data accurately 3D segments C. elegans and P. dumerilii nuclei in fluorescence microscopy, mouse cortical nuclei in micro-CT, zebrafish brain nuclei in EM, and placental cotyledons in human fetal MRI, all without any retraining, finetuning, transfer learning, or domain adaptation. Code is available at https://github.com/neel-dey/AnyStar.
SEMPART: Self-supervised Multi-resolution Partitioning of Image Semantics
Accurately determining salient regions of an image is challenging when labeled data is scarce. DINO-based self-supervised approaches have recently leveraged meaningful image semantics captured by patch-wise features for locating foreground objects. Recent methods have also incorporated intuitive priors and demonstrated value in unsupervised methods for object partitioning. In this paper, we propose SEMPART, which jointly infers coarse and fine bi-partitions over an image's DINO-based semantic graph. Furthermore, SEMPART preserves fine boundary details using graph-driven regularization and successfully distills the coarse mask semantics into the fine mask. Our salient object detection and single object localization findings suggest that SEMPART produces high-quality masks rapidly without additional post-processing and benefits from co-optimizing the coarse and fine branches.
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.
Retrospective Motion Correction of MR Images using Prior-Assisted Deep Learning
In MRI, motion artefacts are among the most common types of artefacts. They can degrade images and render them unusable for accurate diagnosis. Traditional methods, such as prospective or retrospective motion correction, have been proposed to avoid or alleviate motion artefacts. Recently, several other methods based on deep learning approaches have been proposed to solve this problem. This work proposes to enhance the performance of existing deep learning models by the inclusion of additional information present as image priors. The proposed approach has shown promising results and will be further investigated for clinical validity.
Multi-scale self-guided attention for medical image segmentation
Even though convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are driving progress in medical image segmentation, standard models still have some drawbacks. First, the use of multi-scale approaches, i.e., encoder-decoder architectures, leads to a redundant use of information, where similar low-level features are extracted multiple times at multiple scales. Second, long-range feature dependencies are not efficiently modeled, resulting in non-optimal discriminative feature representations associated with each semantic class. In this paper we attempt to overcome these limitations with the proposed architecture, by capturing richer contextual dependencies based on the use of guided self-attention mechanisms. This approach is able to integrate local features with their corresponding global dependencies, as well as highlight interdependent channel maps in an adaptive manner. Further, the additional loss between different modules guides the attention mechanisms to neglect irrelevant information and focus on more discriminant regions of the image by emphasizing relevant feature associations. We evaluate the proposed model in the context of semantic segmentation on three different datasets: abdominal organs, cardiovascular structures and brain tumors. A series of ablation experiments support the importance of these attention modules in the proposed architecture. In addition, compared to other state-of-the-art segmentation networks our model yields better segmentation performance, increasing the accuracy of the predictions while reducing the standard deviation. This demonstrates the efficiency of our approach to generate precise and reliable automatic segmentations of medical images. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/sinAshish/Multi-Scale-Attention
PrEditor3D: Fast and Precise 3D Shape Editing
We propose a training-free approach to 3D editing that enables the editing of a single shape within a few minutes. The edited 3D mesh aligns well with the prompts, and remains identical for regions that are not intended to be altered. To this end, we first project the 3D object onto 4-view images and perform synchronized multi-view image editing along with user-guided text prompts and user-provided rough masks. However, the targeted regions to be edited are ambiguous due to projection from 3D to 2D. To ensure precise editing only in intended regions, we develop a 3D segmentation pipeline that detects edited areas in 3D space, followed by a merging algorithm to seamlessly integrate edited 3D regions with the original input. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous approaches, enabling fast, high-quality editing while preserving unintended regions.
OmniEdit: Building Image Editing Generalist Models Through Specialist Supervision
Instruction-guided image editing methods have demonstrated significant potential by training diffusion models on automatically synthesized or manually annotated image editing pairs. However, these methods remain far from practical, real-life applications. We identify three primary challenges contributing to this gap. Firstly, existing models have limited editing skills due to the biased synthesis process. Secondly, these methods are trained with datasets with a high volume of noise and artifacts. This is due to the application of simple filtering methods like CLIP-score. Thirdly, all these datasets are restricted to a single low resolution and fixed aspect ratio, limiting the versatility to handle real-world use cases. In this paper, we present \omniedit, which is an omnipotent editor to handle seven different image editing tasks with any aspect ratio seamlessly. Our contribution is in four folds: (1) \omniedit is trained by utilizing the supervision from seven different specialist models to ensure task coverage. (2) we utilize importance sampling based on the scores provided by large multimodal models (like GPT-4o) instead of CLIP-score to improve the data quality. (3) we propose a new editing architecture called EditNet to greatly boost the editing success rate, (4) we provide images with different aspect ratios to ensure that our model can handle any image in the wild. We have curated a test set containing images of different aspect ratios, accompanied by diverse instructions to cover different tasks. Both automatic evaluation and human evaluations demonstrate that \omniedit can significantly outperform all the existing models. Our code, dataset and model will be available at https://tiger-ai-lab.github.io/OmniEdit/
RawHDR: High Dynamic Range Image Reconstruction from a Single Raw Image
High dynamic range (HDR) images capture much more intensity levels than standard ones. Current methods predominantly generate HDR images from 8-bit low dynamic range (LDR) sRGB images that have been degraded by the camera processing pipeline. However, it becomes a formidable task to retrieve extremely high dynamic range scenes from such limited bit-depth data. Unlike existing methods, the core idea of this work is to incorporate more informative Raw sensor data to generate HDR images, aiming to recover scene information in hard regions (the darkest and brightest areas of an HDR scene). To this end, we propose a model tailor-made for Raw images, harnessing the unique features of Raw data to facilitate the Raw-to-HDR mapping. Specifically, we learn exposure masks to separate the hard and easy regions of a high dynamic scene. Then, we introduce two important guidances, dual intensity guidance, which guides less informative channels with more informative ones, and global spatial guidance, which extrapolates scene specifics over an extended spatial domain. To verify our Raw-to-HDR approach, we collect a large Raw/HDR paired dataset for both training and testing. Our empirical evaluations validate the superiority of the proposed Raw-to-HDR reconstruction model, as well as our newly captured dataset in the experiments.
CCDN: Checkerboard Corner Detection Network for Robust Camera Calibration
Aiming to improve the checkerboard corner detection robustness against the images with poor quality, such as lens distortion, extreme poses, and noise, we propose a novel detection algorithm which can maintain high accuracy on inputs under multiply scenarios without any prior knowledge of the checkerboard pattern. This whole algorithm includes a checkerboard corner detection network and some post-processing techniques. The network model is a fully convolutional network with improvements of loss function and learning rate, which can deal with the images of arbitrary size and produce correspondingly-sized output with a corner score on each pixel by efficient inference and learning. Besides, in order to remove the false positives, we employ three post-processing techniques including threshold related to maximum response, non-maximum suppression, and clustering. Evaluations on two different datasets show its superior robustness, accuracy and wide applicability in quantitative comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods, like MATE, ChESS, ROCHADE and OCamCalib.
Improving Medical Multi-modal Contrastive Learning with Expert Annotations
We introduce eCLIP, an enhanced version of the CLIP model that integrates expert annotations in the form of radiologist eye-gaze heatmaps. It tackles key challenges in contrastive multi-modal medical imaging analysis, notably data scarcity and the "modality gap" -- a significant disparity between image and text embeddings that diminishes the quality of representations and hampers cross-modal interoperability. eCLIP integrates a heatmap processor and leverages mixup augmentation to efficiently utilize the scarce expert annotations, thus boosting the model's learning effectiveness. eCLIP is designed to be generally applicable to any variant of CLIP without requiring any modifications of the core architecture. Through detailed evaluations across several tasks, including zero-shot inference, linear probing, cross-modal retrieval, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) of radiology reports using a frozen Large Language Model, eCLIP showcases consistent improvements in embedding quality. The outcomes reveal enhanced alignment and uniformity, affirming eCLIP's capability to harness high-quality annotations for enriched multi-modal analysis in the medical imaging domain.
Raw or Cooked? Object Detection on RAW Images
Images fed to a deep neural network have in general undergone several handcrafted image signal processing (ISP) operations, all of which have been optimized to produce visually pleasing images. In this work, we investigate the hypothesis that the intermediate representation of visually pleasing images is sub-optimal for downstream computer vision tasks compared to the RAW image representation. We suggest that the operations of the ISP instead should be optimized towards the end task, by learning the parameters of the operations jointly during training. We extend previous works on this topic and propose a new learnable operation that enables an object detector to achieve superior performance when compared to both previous works and traditional RGB images. In experiments on the open PASCALRAW dataset, we empirically confirm our hypothesis.
NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Real-World Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results
This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on real world super-resolution. It focuses on the participating methods and final results. The challenge addresses the real world setting, where paired true high and low-resolution images are unavailable. For training, only one set of source input images is therefore provided along with a set of unpaired high-quality target images. In Track 1: Image Processing artifacts, the aim is to super-resolve images with synthetically generated image processing artifacts. This allows for quantitative benchmarking of the approaches \wrt a ground-truth image. In Track 2: Smartphone Images, real low-quality smart phone images have to be super-resolved. In both tracks, the ultimate goal is to achieve the best perceptual quality, evaluated using a human study. This is the second challenge on the subject, following AIM 2019, targeting to advance the state-of-the-art in super-resolution. To measure the performance we use the benchmark protocol from AIM 2019. In total 22 teams competed in the final testing phase, demonstrating new and innovative solutions to the problem.
Better May Not Be Fairer: A Study on Subgroup Discrepancy in Image Classification
In this paper, we provide 20,000 non-trivial human annotations on popular datasets as a first step to bridge gap to studying how natural semantic spurious features affect image classification, as prior works often study datasets mixing low-level features due to limitations in accessing realistic datasets. We investigate how natural background colors play a role as spurious features by annotating the test sets of CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 into subgroups based on the background color of each image. We name our datasets CIFAR10-B and CIFAR100-B and integrate them with CIFAR-Cs. We find that overall human-level accuracy does not guarantee consistent subgroup performances, and the phenomenon remains even on models pre-trained on ImageNet or after data augmentation (DA). To alleviate this issue, we propose FlowAug, a semantic DA that leverages decoupled semantic representations captured by a pre-trained generative flow. Experimental results show that FlowAug achieves more consistent subgroup results than other types of DA methods on CIFAR10/100 and on CIFAR10/100-C. Additionally, it shows better generalization performance. Furthermore, we propose a generic metric, MacroStd, for studying model robustness to spurious correlations, where we take a macro average on the weighted standard deviations across different classes. We show MacroStd being more predictive of better performances; per our metric, FlowAug demonstrates improvements on subgroup discrepancy. Although this metric is proposed to study our curated datasets, it applies to all datasets that have subgroups or subclasses. Lastly, we also show superior out-of-distribution results on CIFAR10.1.
Diffusion Brush: A Latent Diffusion Model-based Editing Tool for AI-generated Images
Text-to-image generative models have made remarkable advancements in generating high-quality images. However, generated images often contain undesirable artifacts or other errors due to model limitations. Existing techniques to fine-tune generated images are time-consuming (manual editing), produce poorly-integrated results (inpainting), or result in unexpected changes across the entire image (variation selection and prompt fine-tuning). In this work, we present Diffusion Brush, a Latent Diffusion Model-based (LDM) tool to efficiently fine-tune desired regions within an AI-synthesized image. Our method introduces new random noise patterns at targeted regions during the reverse diffusion process, enabling the model to efficiently make changes to the specified regions while preserving the original context for the rest of the image. We evaluate our method's usability and effectiveness through a user study with artists, comparing our technique against other state-of-the-art image inpainting techniques and editing software for fine-tuning AI-generated imagery.
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
Anisotropic Diffusion for Details Enhancement in Multi-Exposure Image Fusion
We develop a multiexposure image fusion method based on texture features, which exploits the edge preserving and intraregion smoothing property of nonlinear diffusion filters based on partial differential equations (PDE). With the captured multiexposure image series, we first decompose images into base layers and detail layers to extract sharp details and fine details, respectively. The magnitude of the gradient of the image intensity is utilized to encourage smoothness at homogeneous regions in preference to inhomogeneous regions. Then, we have considered texture features of the base layer to generate a mask (i.e., decision mask) that guides the fusion of base layers in multiresolution fashion. Finally, well-exposed fused image is obtained that combines fused base layer and the detail layers at each scale across all the input exposures. Proposed algorithm skipping complex High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) generation and tone mapping steps to produce detail preserving image for display on standard dynamic range display devices. Moreover, our technique is effective for blending flash/no-flash image pair and multifocus images, that is, images focused on different targets.
Hidden Stratification Causes Clinically Meaningful Failures in Machine Learning for Medical Imaging
Machine learning models for medical image analysis often suffer from poor performance on important subsets of a population that are not identified during training or testing. For example, overall performance of a cancer detection model may be high, but the model still consistently misses a rare but aggressive cancer subtype. We refer to this problem as hidden stratification, and observe that it results from incompletely describing the meaningful variation in a dataset. While hidden stratification can substantially reduce the clinical efficacy of machine learning models, its effects remain difficult to measure. In this work, we assess the utility of several possible techniques for measuring and describing hidden stratification effects, and characterize these effects on multiple medical imaging datasets. We find evidence that hidden stratification can occur in unidentified imaging subsets with low prevalence, low label quality, subtle distinguishing features, or spurious correlates, and that it can result in relative performance differences of over 20% on clinically important subsets. Finally, we explore the clinical implications of our findings, and suggest that evaluation of hidden stratification should be a critical component of any machine learning deployment in medical imaging.
Region-Adaptive Transform with Segmentation Prior for Image Compression
Learned Image Compression (LIC) has shown remarkable progress in recent years. Existing works commonly employ CNN-based or self-attention-based modules as transform methods for compression. However, there is no prior research on neural transform that focuses on specific regions. In response, we introduce the class-agnostic segmentation masks (i.e. semantic masks without category labels) for extracting region-adaptive contextual information. Our proposed module, Region-Adaptive Transform, applies adaptive convolutions on different regions guided by the masks. Additionally, we introduce a plug-and-play module named Scale Affine Layer to incorporate rich contexts from various regions. While there have been prior image compression efforts that involve segmentation masks as additional intermediate inputs, our approach differs significantly from them. Our advantages lie in that, to avoid extra bitrate overhead, we treat these masks as privilege information, which is accessible during the model training stage but not required during the inference phase. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to employ class-agnostic masks as privilege information and achieve superior performance in pixel-fidelity metrics, such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). The experimental results demonstrate our improvement compared to previously well-performing methods, with about 8.2% bitrate saving compared to VTM-17.0. The source code is available at https://github.com/GityuxiLiu/SegPIC-for-Image-Compression.
EgoBlur: Responsible Innovation in Aria
Project Aria pushes the frontiers of Egocentric AI with large-scale real-world data collection using purposely designed glasses with privacy first approach. To protect the privacy of bystanders being recorded by the glasses, our research protocols are designed to ensure recorded video is processed by an AI anonymization model that removes bystander faces and vehicle license plates. Detected face and license plate regions are processed with a Gaussian blur such that these personal identification information (PII) regions are obscured. This process helps to ensure that anonymized versions of the video is retained for research purposes. In Project Aria, we have developed a state-of-the-art anonymization system EgoBlur. In this paper, we present extensive analysis of EgoBlur on challenging datasets comparing its performance with other state-of-the-art systems from industry and academia including extensive Responsible AI analysis on recently released Casual Conversations V2 dataset.
Segmenting Known Objects and Unseen Unknowns without Prior Knowledge
Panoptic segmentation methods assign a known class to each pixel given in input. Even for state-of-the-art approaches, this inevitably enforces decisions that systematically lead to wrong predictions for objects outside the training categories. However, robustness against out-of-distribution samples and corner cases is crucial in safety-critical settings to avoid dangerous consequences. Since real-world datasets cannot contain enough data points to adequately sample the long tail of the underlying distribution, models must be able to deal with unseen and unknown scenarios as well. Previous methods targeted this by re-identifying already-seen unlabeled objects. In this work, we propose the necessary step to extend segmentation with a new setting which we term holistic segmentation. Holistic segmentation aims to identify and separate objects of unseen, unknown categories into instances without any prior knowledge about them while performing panoptic segmentation of known classes. We tackle this new problem with U3HS, which finds unknowns as highly uncertain regions and clusters their corresponding instance-aware embeddings into individual objects. By doing so, for the first time in panoptic segmentation with unknown objects, our U3HS is trained without unknown categories, reducing assumptions and leaving the settings as unconstrained as in real-life scenarios. Extensive experiments on public data from MS COCO, Cityscapes, and Lost&Found demonstrate the effectiveness of U3HS for this new, challenging, and assumptions-free setting called holistic segmentation. Project page: https://holisticseg.github.io.
DiffuseRAW: End-to-End Generative RAW Image Processing for Low-Light Images
Imaging under extremely low-light conditions presents a significant challenge and is an ill-posed problem due to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) caused by minimal photon capture. Previously, diffusion models have been used for multiple kinds of generative tasks and image-to-image tasks, however, these models work as a post-processing step. These diffusion models are trained on processed images and learn on processed images. However, such approaches are often not well-suited for extremely low-light tasks. Unlike the task of low-light image enhancement or image-to-image enhancement, we tackle the task of learning the entire image-processing pipeline, from the RAW image to a processed image. For this task, a traditional image processing pipeline often consists of multiple specialized parts that are overly reliant on the downstream tasks. Unlike these, we develop a new generative ISP that relies on fine-tuning latent diffusion models on RAW images and generating processed long-exposure images which allows for the apt use of the priors from large text-to-image generation models. We evaluate our approach on popular end-to-end low-light datasets for which we see promising results and set a new SoTA on the See-in-Dark (SID) dataset. Furthermore, with this work, we hope to pave the way for more generative and diffusion-based image processing and other problems on RAW data.
GridMask Data Augmentation
We propose a novel data augmentation method `GridMask' in this paper. It utilizes information removal to achieve state-of-the-art results in a variety of computer vision tasks. We analyze the requirement of information dropping. Then we show limitation of existing information dropping algorithms and propose our structured method, which is simple and yet very effective. It is based on the deletion of regions of the input image. Our extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the latest AutoAugment, which is way more computationally expensive due to the use of reinforcement learning to find the best policies. On the ImageNet dataset for recognition, COCO2017 object detection, and on Cityscapes dataset for semantic segmentation, our method all notably improves performance over baselines. The extensive experiments manifest the effectiveness and generality of the new method.
A Foundation LAnguage-Image model of the Retina (FLAIR): Encoding expert knowledge in text supervision
Foundation vision-language models are currently transforming computer vision, and are on the rise in medical imaging fueled by their very promising generalization capabilities. However, the initial attempts to transfer this new paradigm to medical imaging have shown less impressive performances than those observed in other domains, due to the significant domain shift and the complex, expert domain knowledge inherent to medical-imaging tasks. Motivated by the need for domain-expert foundation models, we present FLAIR, a pre-trained vision-language model for universal retinal fundus image understanding. To this end, we compiled 37 open-access, mostly categorical fundus imaging datasets from various sources, with up to 97 different target conditions and 284,660 images. We integrate the expert's domain knowledge in the form of descriptive textual prompts, during both pre-training and zero-shot inference, enhancing the less-informative categorical supervision of the data. Such a textual expert's knowledge, which we compiled from the relevant clinical literature and community standards, describes the fine-grained features of the pathologies as well as the hierarchies and dependencies between them. We report comprehensive evaluations, which illustrate the benefit of integrating expert knowledge and the strong generalization capabilities of FLAIR under difficult scenarios with domain shifts or unseen categories. When adapted with a lightweight linear probe, FLAIR outperforms fully-trained, dataset-focused models, more so in the few-shot regimes. Interestingly, FLAIR outperforms by a large margin more generalist, larger-scale image-language models, which emphasizes the potential of embedding experts' domain knowledge and the limitations of generalist models in medical imaging.
SAM 2 in Robotic Surgery: An Empirical Evaluation for Robustness and Generalization in Surgical Video Segmentation
The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) 2 has demonstrated remarkable foundational competence in semantic segmentation, with its memory mechanism and mask decoder further addressing challenges in video tracking and object occlusion, thereby achieving superior results in interactive segmentation for both images and videos. Building upon our previous empirical studies, we further explore the zero-shot segmentation performance of SAM 2 in robot-assisted surgery based on prompts, alongside its robustness against real-world corruption. For static images, we employ two forms of prompts: 1-point and bounding box, while for video sequences, the 1-point prompt is applied to the initial frame. Through extensive experimentation on the MICCAI EndoVis 2017 and EndoVis 2018 benchmarks, SAM 2, when utilizing bounding box prompts, outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in comparative evaluations. The results with point prompts also exhibit a substantial enhancement over SAM's capabilities, nearing or even surpassing existing unprompted SOTA methodologies. Besides, SAM 2 demonstrates improved inference speed and less performance degradation against various image corruption. Although slightly unsatisfactory results remain in specific edges or regions, SAM 2's robust adaptability to 1-point prompts underscores its potential for downstream surgical tasks with limited prompt requirements.
Evaluating Data Attribution for Text-to-Image Models
While large text-to-image models are able to synthesize "novel" images, these images are necessarily a reflection of the training data. The problem of data attribution in such models -- which of the images in the training set are most responsible for the appearance of a given generated image -- is a difficult yet important one. As an initial step toward this problem, we evaluate attribution through "customization" methods, which tune an existing large-scale model toward a given exemplar object or style. Our key insight is that this allows us to efficiently create synthetic images that are computationally influenced by the exemplar by construction. With our new dataset of such exemplar-influenced images, we are able to evaluate various data attribution algorithms and different possible feature spaces. Furthermore, by training on our dataset, we can tune standard models, such as DINO, CLIP, and ViT, toward the attribution problem. Even though the procedure is tuned towards small exemplar sets, we show generalization to larger sets. Finally, by taking into account the inherent uncertainty of the problem, we can assign soft attribution scores over a set of training images.
Puzzle Similarity: A Perceptually-guided No-Reference Metric for Artifact Detection in 3D Scene Reconstructions
Modern reconstruction techniques can effectively model complex 3D scenes from sparse 2D views. However, automatically assessing the quality of novel views and identifying artifacts is challenging due to the lack of ground truth images and the limitations of no-reference image metrics in predicting detailed artifact maps. The absence of such quality metrics hinders accurate predictions of the quality of generated views and limits the adoption of post-processing techniques, such as inpainting, to enhance reconstruction quality. In this work, we propose a new no-reference metric, Puzzle Similarity, which is designed to localize artifacts in novel views. Our approach utilizes image patch statistics from the input views to establish a scene-specific distribution that is later used to identify poorly reconstructed regions in the novel views. We test and evaluate our method in the context of 3D reconstruction; to this end, we collected a novel dataset of human quality assessment in unseen reconstructed views. Through this dataset, we demonstrate that our method can not only successfully localize artifacts in novel views, correlating with human assessment, but do so without direct references. Surprisingly, our metric outperforms both no-reference metrics and popular full-reference image metrics. We can leverage our new metric to enhance applications like automatic image restoration, guided acquisition, or 3D reconstruction from sparse inputs.
Polarized Self-Attention: Towards High-quality Pixel-wise Regression
Pixel-wise regression is probably the most common problem in fine-grained computer vision tasks, such as estimating keypoint heatmaps and segmentation masks. These regression problems are very challenging particularly because they require, at low computation overheads, modeling long-range dependencies on high-resolution inputs/outputs to estimate the highly nonlinear pixel-wise semantics. While attention mechanisms in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks(DCNNs) has become popular for boosting long-range dependencies, element-specific attention, such as Nonlocal blocks, is highly complex and noise-sensitive to learn, and most of simplified attention hybrids try to reach the best compromise among multiple types of tasks. In this paper, we present the Polarized Self-Attention(PSA) block that incorporates two critical designs towards high-quality pixel-wise regression: (1) Polarized filtering: keeping high internal resolution in both channel and spatial attention computation while completely collapsing input tensors along their counterpart dimensions. (2) Enhancement: composing non-linearity that directly fits the output distribution of typical fine-grained regression, such as the 2D Gaussian distribution (keypoint heatmaps), or the 2D Binormial distribution (binary segmentation masks). PSA appears to have exhausted the representation capacity within its channel-only and spatial-only branches, such that there is only marginal metric differences between its sequential and parallel layouts. Experimental results show that PSA boosts standard baselines by 2-4 points, and boosts state-of-the-arts by 1-2 points on 2D pose estimation and semantic segmentation benchmarks.
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.
Explaining image classifiers by removing input features using generative models
Perturbation-based explanation methods often measure the contribution of an input feature to an image classifier's outputs by heuristically removing it via e.g. blurring, adding noise, or graying out, which often produce unrealistic, out-of-samples. Instead, we propose to integrate a generative inpainter into three representative attribution methods to remove an input feature. Our proposed change improved all three methods in (1) generating more plausible counterfactual samples under the true data distribution; (2) being more accurate according to three metrics: object localization, deletion, and saliency metrics; and (3) being more robust to hyperparameter changes. Our findings were consistent across both ImageNet and Places365 datasets and two different pairs of classifiers and inpainters.
Image Super-resolution Via Latent Diffusion: A Sampling-space Mixture Of Experts And Frequency-augmented Decoder Approach
The recent use of diffusion prior, enhanced by pre-trained text-image models, has markedly elevated the performance of image super-resolution (SR). To alleviate the huge computational cost required by pixel-based diffusion SR, latent-based methods utilize a feature encoder to transform the image and then implement the SR image generation in a compact latent space. Nevertheless, there are two major issues that limit the performance of latent-based diffusion. First, the compression of latent space usually causes reconstruction distortion. Second, huge computational cost constrains the parameter scale of the diffusion model. To counteract these issues, we first propose a frequency compensation module that enhances the frequency components from latent space to pixel space. The reconstruction distortion (especially for high-frequency information) can be significantly decreased. Then, we propose to use Sample-Space Mixture of Experts (SS-MoE) to achieve more powerful latent-based SR, which steadily improves the capacity of the model without a significant increase in inference costs. These carefully crafted designs contribute to performance improvements in largely explored 4x blind super-resolution benchmarks and extend to large magnification factors, i.e., 8x image SR benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/amandaluof/moe_sr.
Fighting Fake News: Image Splice Detection via Learned Self-Consistency
Advances in photo editing and manipulation tools have made it significantly easier to create fake imagery. Learning to detect such manipulations, however, remains a challenging problem due to the lack of sufficient amounts of manipulated training data. In this paper, we propose a learning algorithm for detecting visual image manipulations that is trained only using a large dataset of real photographs. The algorithm uses the automatically recorded photo EXIF metadata as supervisory signal for training a model to determine whether an image is self-consistent -- that is, whether its content could have been produced by a single imaging pipeline. We apply this self-consistency model to the task of detecting and localizing image splices. The proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance on several image forensics benchmarks, despite never seeing any manipulated images at training. That said, it is merely a step in the long quest for a truly general purpose visual forensics tool.
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.
PLUTO: Pathology-Universal Transformer
Pathology is the study of microscopic inspection of tissue, and a pathology diagnosis is often the medical gold standard to diagnose disease. Pathology images provide a unique challenge for computer-vision-based analysis: a single pathology Whole Slide Image (WSI) is gigapixel-sized and often contains hundreds of thousands to millions of objects of interest across multiple resolutions. In this work, we propose PathoLogy Universal TransfOrmer (PLUTO): a light-weight pathology FM that is pre-trained on a diverse dataset of 195 million image tiles collected from multiple sites and extracts meaningful representations across multiple WSI scales that enable a large variety of downstream pathology tasks. In particular, we design task-specific adaptation heads that utilize PLUTO's output embeddings for tasks which span pathology scales ranging from subcellular to slide-scale, including instance segmentation, tile classification, and slide-level prediction. We compare PLUTO's performance to other state-of-the-art methods on a diverse set of external and internal benchmarks covering multiple biologically relevant tasks, tissue types, resolutions, stains, and scanners. We find that PLUTO matches or outperforms existing task-specific baselines and pathology-specific foundation models, some of which use orders-of-magnitude larger datasets and model sizes when compared to PLUTO. Our findings present a path towards a universal embedding to power pathology image analysis, and motivate further exploration around pathology foundation models in terms of data diversity, architectural improvements, sample efficiency, and practical deployability in real-world applications.
Scenimefy: Learning to Craft Anime Scene via Semi-Supervised Image-to-Image Translation
Automatic high-quality rendering of anime scenes from complex real-world images is of significant practical value. The challenges of this task lie in the complexity of the scenes, the unique features of anime style, and the lack of high-quality datasets to bridge the domain gap. Despite promising attempts, previous efforts are still incompetent in achieving satisfactory results with consistent semantic preservation, evident stylization, and fine details. In this study, we propose Scenimefy, a novel semi-supervised image-to-image translation framework that addresses these challenges. Our approach guides the learning with structure-consistent pseudo paired data, simplifying the pure unsupervised setting. The pseudo data are derived uniquely from a semantic-constrained StyleGAN leveraging rich model priors like CLIP. We further apply segmentation-guided data selection to obtain high-quality pseudo supervision. A patch-wise contrastive style loss is introduced to improve stylization and fine details. Besides, we contribute a high-resolution anime scene dataset to facilitate future research. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both perceptual quality and quantitative performance.
DiffuseHigh: Training-free Progressive High-Resolution Image Synthesis through Structure Guidance
Recent surge in large-scale generative models has spurred the development of vast fields in computer vision. In particular, text-to-image diffusion models have garnered widespread adoption across diverse domain due to their potential for high-fidelity image generation. Nonetheless, existing large-scale diffusion models are confined to generate images of up to 1K resolution, which is far from meeting the demands of contemporary commercial applications. Directly sampling higher-resolution images often yields results marred by artifacts such as object repetition and distorted shapes. Addressing the aforementioned issues typically necessitates training or fine-tuning models on higher resolution datasets. However, this undertaking poses a formidable challenge due to the difficulty in collecting large-scale high-resolution contents and substantial computational resources. While several preceding works have proposed alternatives, they often fail to produce convincing results. In this work, we probe the generative ability of diffusion models at higher resolution beyond its original capability and propose a novel progressive approach that fully utilizes generated low-resolution image to guide the generation of higher resolution image. Our method obviates the need for additional training or fine-tuning which significantly lowers the burden of computational costs. Extensive experiments and results validate the efficiency and efficacy of our method. Project page: https://yhyun225.github.io/DiffuseHigh/
Crafting Parts for Expressive Object Composition
Text-to-image generation from large generative models like Stable Diffusion, DALLE-2, etc., have become a common base for various tasks due to their superior quality and extensive knowledge bases. As image composition and generation are creative processes the artists need control over various parts of the images being generated. We find that just adding details about parts in the base text prompt either leads to an entirely different image (e.g., missing/incorrect identity) or the extra part details simply being ignored. To mitigate these issues, we introduce PartCraft, which enables image generation based on fine-grained part-level details specified for objects in the base text prompt. This allows more control for artists and enables novel object compositions by combining distinctive object parts. PartCraft first localizes object parts by denoising the object region from a specific diffusion process. This enables each part token to be localized to the right object region. After obtaining part masks, we run a localized diffusion process in each of the part regions based on fine-grained part descriptions and combine them to produce the final image. All the stages of PartCraft are based on repurposing a pre-trained diffusion model, which enables it to generalize across various domains without training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of part-level control provided by PartCraft qualitatively through visual examples and quantitatively in comparison to the contemporary baselines.
VITON-HD: High-Resolution Virtual Try-On via Misalignment-Aware Normalization
The task of image-based virtual try-on aims to transfer a target clothing item onto the corresponding region of a person, which is commonly tackled by fitting the item to the desired body part and fusing the warped item with the person. While an increasing number of studies have been conducted, the resolution of synthesized images is still limited to low (e.g., 256x192), which acts as the critical limitation against satisfying online consumers. We argue that the limitation stems from several challenges: as the resolution increases, the artifacts in the misaligned areas between the warped clothes and the desired clothing regions become noticeable in the final results; the architectures used in existing methods have low performance in generating high-quality body parts and maintaining the texture sharpness of the clothes. To address the challenges, we propose a novel virtual try-on method called VITON-HD that successfully synthesizes 1024x768 virtual try-on images. Specifically, we first prepare the segmentation map to guide our virtual try-on synthesis, and then roughly fit the target clothing item to a given person's body. Next, we propose ALIgnment-Aware Segment (ALIAS) normalization and ALIAS generator to handle the misaligned areas and preserve the details of 1024x768 inputs. Through rigorous comparison with existing methods, we demonstrate that VITON-HD highly surpasses the baselines in terms of synthesized image quality both qualitatively and quantitatively. Code is available at https://github.com/shadow2496/VITON-HD.
The iToBoS dataset: skin region images extracted from 3D total body photographs for lesion detection
Artificial intelligence has significantly advanced skin cancer diagnosis by enabling rapid and accurate detection of malignant lesions. In this domain, most publicly available image datasets consist of single, isolated skin lesions positioned at the center of the image. While these lesion-centric datasets have been fundamental for developing diagnostic algorithms, they lack the context of the surrounding skin, which is critical for improving lesion detection. The iToBoS dataset was created to address this challenge. It includes 16,954 images of skin regions from 100 participants, captured using 3D total body photography. Each image roughly corresponds to a 7 times 9 cm section of skin with all suspicious lesions annotated using bounding boxes. Additionally, the dataset provides metadata such as anatomical location, age group, and sun damage score for each image. This dataset aims to facilitate training and benchmarking of algorithms, with the goal of enabling early detection of skin cancer and deployment of this technology in non-clinical environments.
RealFusion: 360° Reconstruction of Any Object from a Single Image
We consider the problem of reconstructing a full 360{\deg} photographic model of an object from a single image of it. We do so by fitting a neural radiance field to the image, but find this problem to be severely ill-posed. We thus take an off-the-self conditional image generator based on diffusion and engineer a prompt that encourages it to "dream up" novel views of the object. Using an approach inspired by DreamFields and DreamFusion, we fuse the given input view, the conditional prior, and other regularizers in a final, consistent reconstruction. We demonstrate state-of-the-art reconstruction results on benchmark images when compared to prior methods for monocular 3D reconstruction of objects. Qualitatively, our reconstructions provide a faithful match of the input view and a plausible extrapolation of its appearance and 3D shape, including to the side of the object not visible in the image.
Generalize or Detect? Towards Robust Semantic Segmentation Under Multiple Distribution Shifts
In open-world scenarios, where both novel classes and domains may exist, an ideal segmentation model should detect anomaly classes for safety and generalize to new domains. However, existing methods often struggle to distinguish between domain-level and semantic-level distribution shifts, leading to poor out-of-distribution (OOD) detection or domain generalization performance. In this work, we aim to equip the model to generalize effectively to covariate-shift regions while precisely identifying semantic-shift regions. To achieve this, we design a novel generative augmentation method to produce coherent images that incorporate both anomaly (or novel) objects and various covariate shifts at both image and object levels. Furthermore, we introduce a training strategy that recalibrates uncertainty specifically for semantic shifts and enhances the feature extractor to align features associated with domain shifts. We validate the effectiveness of our method across benchmarks featuring both semantic and domain shifts. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all benchmarks for both OOD detection and domain generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/gaozhitong/MultiShiftSeg.
TIAM -- A Metric for Evaluating Alignment in Text-to-Image Generation
The progress in the generation of synthetic images has made it crucial to assess their quality. While several metrics have been proposed to assess the rendering of images, it is crucial for Text-to-Image (T2I) models, which generate images based on a prompt, to consider additional aspects such as to which extent the generated image matches the important content of the prompt. Moreover, although the generated images usually result from a random starting point, the influence of this one is generally not considered. In this article, we propose a new metric based on prompt templates to study the alignment between the content specified in the prompt and the corresponding generated images. It allows us to better characterize the alignment in terms of the type of the specified objects, their number, and their color. We conducted a study on several recent T2I models about various aspects. An additional interesting result we obtained with our approach is that image quality can vary drastically depending on the latent noise used as a seed for the images. We also quantify the influence of the number of concepts in the prompt, their order as well as their (color) attributes. Finally, our method allows us to identify some latent seeds that produce better images than others, opening novel directions of research on this understudied topic.
Coherent and Multi-modality Image Inpainting via Latent Space Optimization
With the advancements in denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs), image inpainting has significantly evolved from merely filling information based on nearby regions to generating content conditioned on various prompts such as text, exemplar images, and sketches. However, existing methods, such as model fine-tuning and simple concatenation of latent vectors, often result in generation failures due to overfitting and inconsistency between the inpainted region and the background. In this paper, we argue that the current large diffusion models are sufficiently powerful to generate realistic images without further tuning. Hence, we introduce PILOT (inPainting vIa Latent OpTimization), an optimization approach grounded on a novel semantic centralization and background preservation loss. Our method searches latent spaces capable of generating inpainted regions that exhibit high fidelity to user-provided prompts while maintaining coherence with the background. Furthermore, we propose a strategy to balance optimization expense and image quality, significantly enhancing generation efficiency. Our method seamlessly integrates with any pre-trained model, including ControlNet and DreamBooth, making it suitable for deployment in multi-modal editing tools. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that PILOT outperforms existing approaches by generating more coherent, diverse, and faithful inpainted regions in response to provided prompts.
Segmentation is All You Need
Region proposal mechanisms are essential for existing deep learning approaches to object detection in images. Although they can generally achieve a good detection performance under normal circumstances, their recall in a scene with extreme cases is unacceptably low. This is mainly because bounding box annotations contain much environment noise information, and non-maximum suppression (NMS) is required to select target boxes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the first anchor-free and NMS-free object detection model called weakly supervised multimodal annotation segmentation (WSMA-Seg), which utilizes segmentation models to achieve an accurate and robust object detection without NMS. In WSMA-Seg, multimodal annotations are proposed to achieve an instance-aware segmentation using weakly supervised bounding boxes; we also develop a run-data-based following algorithm to trace contours of objects. In addition, we propose a multi-scale pooling segmentation (MSP-Seg) as the underlying segmentation model of WSMA-Seg to achieve a more accurate segmentation and to enhance the detection accuracy of WSMA-Seg. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that the proposed WSMA-Seg approach outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors.
Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention
Recent deep learning based approaches have shown promising results for the challenging task of inpainting large missing regions in an image. These methods can generate visually plausible image structures and textures, but often create distorted structures or blurry textures inconsistent with surrounding areas. This is mainly due to ineffectiveness of convolutional neural networks in explicitly borrowing or copying information from distant spatial locations. On the other hand, traditional texture and patch synthesis approaches are particularly suitable when it needs to borrow textures from the surrounding regions. Motivated by these observations, we propose a new deep generative model-based approach which can not only synthesize novel image structures but also explicitly utilize surrounding image features as references during network training to make better predictions. The model is a feed-forward, fully convolutional neural network which can process images with multiple holes at arbitrary locations and with variable sizes during the test time. Experiments on multiple datasets including faces (CelebA, CelebA-HQ), textures (DTD) and natural images (ImageNet, Places2) demonstrate that our proposed approach generates higher-quality inpainting results than existing ones. Code, demo and models are available at: https://github.com/JiahuiYu/generative_inpainting.
Tell Me What You See: Text-Guided Real-World Image Denoising
Image reconstruction in low-light conditions is a challenging problem. Many solutions have been proposed for it, where the main approach is trying to learn a good prior of natural images along with modeling the true statistics of the noise in the scene. In the presence of very low lighting conditions, such approaches are usually not enough, and additional information is required, e.g., in the form of using multiple captures. In this work, we suggest as an alternative to add a description of the scene as prior, which can be easily done by the photographer who is capturing the scene. Using a text-conditioned diffusion model, we show that adding image caption information improves significantly the image reconstruction in low-light conditions on both synthetic and real-world images.
Alignment-free HDR Deghosting with Semantics Consistent Transformer
High dynamic range (HDR) imaging aims to retrieve information from multiple low-dynamic range inputs to generate realistic output. The essence is to leverage the contextual information, including both dynamic and static semantics, for better image generation. Existing methods often focus on the spatial misalignment across input frames caused by the foreground and/or camera motion. However, there is no research on jointly leveraging the dynamic and static context in a simultaneous manner. To delve into this problem, we propose a novel alignment-free network with a Semantics Consistent Transformer (SCTNet) with both spatial and channel attention modules in the network. The spatial attention aims to deal with the intra-image correlation to model the dynamic motion, while the channel attention enables the inter-image intertwining to enhance the semantic consistency across frames. Aside from this, we introduce a novel realistic HDR dataset with more variations in foreground objects, environmental factors, and larger motions. Extensive comparisons on both conventional datasets and ours validate the effectiveness of our method, achieving the best trade-off on the performance and the computational cost.
Perceptual Fairness in Image Restoration
Fairness in image restoration tasks is the desire to treat different sub-groups of images equally well. Existing definitions of fairness in image restoration are highly restrictive. They consider a reconstruction to be a correct outcome for a group (e.g., women) only if it falls within the group's set of ground truth images (e.g., natural images of women); otherwise, it is considered entirely incorrect. Consequently, such definitions are prone to controversy, as errors in image restoration can manifest in various ways. In this work we offer an alternative approach towards fairness in image restoration, by considering the Group Perceptual Index (GPI), which we define as the statistical distance between the distribution of the group's ground truth images and the distribution of their reconstructions. We assess the fairness of an algorithm by comparing the GPI of different groups, and say that it achieves perfect Perceptual Fairness (PF) if the GPIs of all groups are identical. We motivate and theoretically study our new notion of fairness, draw its connection to previous ones, and demonstrate its utility on state-of-the-art face image super-resolution algorithms.
Deep Optimal Transport: A Practical Algorithm for Photo-realistic Image Restoration
We propose an image restoration algorithm that can control the perceptual quality and/or the mean square error (MSE) of any pre-trained model, trading one over the other at test time. Our algorithm is few-shot: Given about a dozen images restored by the model, it can significantly improve the perceptual quality and/or the MSE of the model for newly restored images without further training. Our approach is motivated by a recent theoretical result that links between the minimum MSE (MMSE) predictor and the predictor that minimizes the MSE under a perfect perceptual quality constraint. Specifically, it has been shown that the latter can be obtained by optimally transporting the output of the former, such that its distribution matches the source data. Thus, to improve the perceptual quality of a predictor that was originally trained to minimize MSE, we approximate the optimal transport by a linear transformation in the latent space of a variational auto-encoder, which we compute in closed-form using empirical means and covariances. Going beyond the theory, we find that applying the same procedure on models that were initially trained to achieve high perceptual quality, typically improves their perceptual quality even further. And by interpolating the results with the original output of the model, we can improve their MSE on the expense of perceptual quality. We illustrate our method on a variety of degradations applied to general content images of arbitrary dimensions.
CONFORM: Contrast is All You Need For High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Images produced by text-to-image diffusion models might not always faithfully represent the semantic intent of the provided text prompt, where the model might overlook or entirely fail to produce certain objects. Existing solutions often require customly tailored functions for each of these problems, leading to sub-optimal results, especially for complex prompts. Our work introduces a novel perspective by tackling this challenge in a contrastive context. Our approach intuitively promotes the segregation of objects in attention maps while also maintaining that pairs of related attributes are kept close to each other. We conduct extensive experiments across a wide variety of scenarios, each involving unique combinations of objects, attributes, and scenes. These experiments effectively showcase the versatility, efficiency, and flexibility of our method in working with both latent and pixel-based diffusion models, including Stable Diffusion and Imagen. Moreover, we publicly share our source code to facilitate further research.
Visual Prompt Engineering for Medical Vision Language Models in Radiology
Medical image classification in radiology faces significant challenges, particularly in generalizing to unseen pathologies. In contrast, CLIP offers a promising solution by leveraging multimodal learning to improve zero-shot classification performance. However, in the medical domain, lesions can be small and might not be well represented in the embedding space. Therefore, in this paper, we explore the potential of visual prompt engineering to enhance the capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs) in radiology. Leveraging BiomedCLIP, trained on extensive biomedical image-text pairs, we investigate the impact of embedding visual markers directly within radiological images to guide the model's attention to critical regions. Our evaluation on the JSRT dataset, focusing on lung nodule malignancy classification, demonstrates that incorporating visual prompts x2013 such as arrows, circles, and contours x2013 significantly improves classification metrics including AUROC, AUPRC, F1 score, and accuracy. Moreover, the study provides attention maps, showcasing enhanced model interpretability and focus on clinically relevant areas. These findings underscore the efficacy of visual prompt engineering as a straightforward yet powerful approach to advance VLM performance in medical image analysis.
Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images
Natural language offers a highly intuitive interface for image editing. In this paper, we introduce the first solution for performing local (region-based) edits in generic natural images, based on a natural language description along with an ROI mask. We achieve our goal by leveraging and combining a pretrained language-image model (CLIP), to steer the edit towards a user-provided text prompt, with a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) to generate natural-looking results. To seamlessly fuse the edited region with the unchanged parts of the image, we spatially blend noised versions of the input image with the local text-guided diffusion latent at a progression of noise levels. In addition, we show that adding augmentations to the diffusion process mitigates adversarial results. We compare against several baselines and related methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and show that our method outperforms these solutions in terms of overall realism, ability to preserve the background and matching the text. Finally, we show several text-driven editing applications, including adding a new object to an image, removing/replacing/altering existing objects, background replacement, and image extrapolation. Code is available at: https://omriavrahami.com/blended-diffusion-page/
APISR: Anime Production Inspired Real-World Anime Super-Resolution
While real-world anime super-resolution (SR) has gained increasing attention in the SR community, existing methods still adopt techniques from the photorealistic domain. In this paper, we analyze the anime production workflow and rethink how to use characteristics of it for the sake of the real-world anime SR. First, we argue that video networks and datasets are not necessary for anime SR due to the repetition use of hand-drawing frames. Instead, we propose an anime image collection pipeline by choosing the least compressed and the most informative frames from the video sources. Based on this pipeline, we introduce the Anime Production-oriented Image (API) dataset. In addition, we identify two anime-specific challenges of distorted and faint hand-drawn lines and unwanted color artifacts. We address the first issue by introducing a prediction-oriented compression module in the image degradation model and a pseudo-ground truth preparation with enhanced hand-drawn lines. In addition, we introduce the balanced twin perceptual loss combining both anime and photorealistic high-level features to mitigate unwanted color artifacts and increase visual clarity. We evaluate our method through extensive experiments on the public benchmark, showing our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin.
SuperInpaint: Learning Detail-Enhanced Attentional Implicit Representation for Super-resolutional Image Inpainting
In this work, we introduce a challenging image restoration task, referred to as SuperInpaint, which aims to reconstruct missing regions in low-resolution images and generate completed images with arbitrarily higher resolutions. We have found that this task cannot be effectively addressed by stacking state-of-the-art super-resolution and image inpainting methods as they amplify each other's flaws, leading to noticeable artifacts. To overcome these limitations, we propose the detail-enhanced attentional implicit representation (DEAR) that can achieve SuperInpaint with a single model, resulting in high-quality completed images with arbitrary resolutions. Specifically, we use a deep convolutional network to extract the latent embedding of an input image and then enhance the high-frequency components of the latent embedding via an adaptive high-pass filter. This leads to detail-enhanced semantic embedding. We further feed the semantic embedding into an unmask-attentional module that suppresses embeddings from ineffective masked pixels. Additionally, we extract a pixel-wise importance map that indicates which pixels should be used for image reconstruction. Given the coordinates of a pixel we want to reconstruct, we first collect its neighboring pixels in the input image and extract their detail-enhanced semantic embeddings, unmask-attentional semantic embeddings, importance values, and spatial distances to the desired pixel. Then, we feed all the above terms into an implicit representation and generate the color of the specified pixel. To evaluate our method, we extend three existing datasets for this new task and build 18 meaningful baselines using SOTA inpainting and super-resolution methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms all existing methods by a significant margin on four widely used metrics.
Light Field Diffusion for Single-View Novel View Synthesis
Single-view novel view synthesis, the task of generating images from new viewpoints based on a single reference image, is an important but challenging task in computer vision. Recently, Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) has become popular in this area due to its strong ability to generate high-fidelity images. However, current diffusion-based methods directly rely on camera pose matrices as viewing conditions, globally and implicitly introducing 3D constraints. These methods may suffer from inconsistency among generated images from different perspectives, especially in regions with intricate textures and structures. In this work, we present Light Field Diffusion (LFD), a conditional diffusion-based model for single-view novel view synthesis. Unlike previous methods that employ camera pose matrices, LFD transforms the camera view information into light field encoding and combines it with the reference image. This design introduces local pixel-wise constraints within the diffusion models, thereby encouraging better multi-view consistency. Experiments on several datasets show that our LFD can efficiently generate high-fidelity images and maintain better 3D consistency even in intricate regions. Our method can generate images with higher quality than NeRF-based models, and we obtain sample quality similar to other diffusion-based models but with only one-third of the model size.
PrimeComposer: Faster Progressively Combined Diffusion for Image Composition with Attention Steering
Image composition involves seamlessly integrating given objects into a specific visual context. Current training-free methods rely on composing attention weights from several samplers to guide the generator. However, since these weights are derived from disparate contexts, their combination leads to coherence confusion and loss of appearance information. These issues worsen with their excessive focus on background generation, even when unnecessary in this task. This not only impedes their swift implementation but also compromises foreground generation quality. Moreover, these methods introduce unwanted artifacts in the transition area. In this paper, we formulate image composition as a subject-based local editing task, solely focusing on foreground generation. At each step, the edited foreground is combined with the noisy background to maintain scene consistency. To address the remaining issues, we propose PrimeComposer, a faster training-free diffuser that composites the images by well-designed attention steering across different noise levels. This steering is predominantly achieved by our Correlation Diffuser, utilizing its self-attention layers at each step. Within these layers, the synthesized subject interacts with both the referenced object and background, capturing intricate details and coherent relationships. This prior information is encoded into the attention weights, which are then integrated into the self-attention layers of the generator to guide the synthesis process. Besides, we introduce a Region-constrained Cross-Attention to confine the impact of specific subject-related tokens to desired regions, addressing the unwanted artifacts shown in the prior method thereby further improving the coherence in the transition area. Our method exhibits the fastest inference efficiency and extensive experiments demonstrate our superiority both qualitatively and quantitatively.
DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection
Diffusion models have shown remarkable success in visual synthesis, but have also raised concerns about potential abuse for malicious purposes. In this paper, we seek to build a detector for telling apart real images from diffusion-generated images. We find that existing detectors struggle to detect images generated by diffusion models, even if we include generated images from a specific diffusion model in their training data. To address this issue, we propose a novel image representation called DIffusion Reconstruction Error (DIRE), which measures the error between an input image and its reconstruction counterpart by a pre-trained diffusion model. We observe that diffusion-generated images can be approximately reconstructed by a diffusion model while real images cannot. It provides a hint that DIRE can serve as a bridge to distinguish generated and real images. DIRE provides an effective way to detect images generated by most diffusion models, and it is general for detecting generated images from unseen diffusion models and robust to various perturbations. Furthermore, we establish a comprehensive diffusion-generated benchmark including images generated by eight diffusion models to evaluate the performance of diffusion-generated image detectors. Extensive experiments on our collected benchmark demonstrate that DIRE exhibits superiority over previous generated-image detectors. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ZhendongWang6/DIRE.
MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs
Chest radiography is an extremely powerful imaging modality, allowing for a detailed inspection of a patient's thorax, but requiring specialized training for proper interpretation. With the advent of high performance general purpose computer vision algorithms, the accurate automated analysis of chest radiographs is becoming increasingly of interest to researchers. However, a key challenge in the development of these techniques is the lack of sufficient data. Here we describe MIMIC-CXR-JPG v2.0.0, a large dataset of 377,110 chest x-rays associated with 227,827 imaging studies sourced from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center between 2011 - 2016. Images are provided with 14 labels derived from two natural language processing tools applied to the corresponding free-text radiology reports. MIMIC-CXR-JPG is derived entirely from the MIMIC-CXR database, and aims to provide a convenient processed version of MIMIC-CXR, as well as to provide a standard reference for data splits and image labels. All images have been de-identified to protect patient privacy. The dataset is made freely available to facilitate and encourage a wide range of research in medical computer vision.
Image-Based Detection of Modifications in Gas Pump PCBs with Deep Convolutional Autoencoders
In this paper, we introduce an approach for detecting modifications in assembled printed circuit boards based on photographs taken without tight control over perspective and illumination conditions. One instance of this problem is the visual inspection of gas pumps PCBs, which can be modified by fraudsters wishing to deceive costumers or evade taxes. Given the uncontrolled environment and the huge number of possible modifications, we address the problem as a case of anomaly detection, proposing an approach that is directed towards the characteristics of that scenario, while being well-suited for other similar applications. The proposed approach employs a deep convolutional autoencoder trained to reconstruct images of an unmodified board, but which remains unable to do the same for images showing modifications. By comparing the input image with its reconstruction, it is possible to segment anomalies and modifications in a pixel-wise manner. Experiments performed on a dataset built to represent real-world situations (and which we will make publicly available) show that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches for anomaly segmentation in the considered scenario, while producing comparable results on the popular MVTec-AD dataset for a more general object anomaly detection task.
Learning Segmentation Masks with the Independence Prior
An instance with a bad mask might make a composite image that uses it look fake. This encourages us to learn segmentation by generating realistic composite images. To achieve this, we propose a novel framework that exploits a new proposed prior called the independence prior based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The generator produces an image with multiple category-specific instance providers, a layout module and a composition module. Firstly, each provider independently outputs a category-specific instance image with a soft mask. Then the provided instances' poses are corrected by the layout module. Lastly, the composition module combines these instances into a final image. Training with adversarial loss and penalty for mask area, each provider learns a mask that is as small as possible but enough to cover a complete category-specific instance. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation methods widely use grouping cues modeling the association between image parts, which are either artificially designed or learned with costly segmentation labels or only modeled on local pairs. Unlike them, our method automatically models the dependence between any parts and learns instance segmentation. We apply our framework in two cases: (1) Foreground segmentation on category-specific images with box-level annotation. (2) Unsupervised learning of instance appearances and masks with only one image of homogeneous object cluster (HOC). We get appealing results in both tasks, which shows the independence prior is useful for instance segmentation and it is possible to unsupervisedly learn instance masks with only one image.
Towards image compression with perfect realism at ultra-low bitrates
Image codecs are typically optimized to trade-off bitrate \vs distortion metrics. At low bitrates, this leads to compression artefacts which are easily perceptible, even when training with perceptual or adversarial losses. To improve image quality and remove dependency on the bitrate, we propose to decode with iterative diffusion models. We condition the decoding process on a vector-quantized image representation, as well as a global image description to provide additional context. We dub our model PerCo for 'perceptual compression', and compare it to state-of-the-art codecs at rates from 0.1 down to 0.003 bits per pixel. The latter rate is more than an order of magnitude smaller than those considered in most prior work, compressing a 512x768 Kodak image with less than 153 bytes. Despite this ultra-low bitrate, our approach maintains the ability to reconstruct realistic images. We find that our model leads to reconstructions with state-of-the-art visual quality as measured by FID and KID. As predicted by rate-distortion-perception theory, visual quality is less dependent on the bitrate than previous methods.
OmniSSR: Zero-shot Omnidirectional Image Super-Resolution using Stable Diffusion Model
Omnidirectional images (ODIs) are commonly used in real-world visual tasks, and high-resolution ODIs help improve the performance of related visual tasks. Most existing super-resolution methods for ODIs use end-to-end learning strategies, resulting in inferior realness of generated images and a lack of effective out-of-domain generalization capabilities in training methods. Image generation methods represented by diffusion model provide strong priors for visual tasks and have been proven to be effectively applied to image restoration tasks. Leveraging the image priors of the Stable Diffusion (SD) model, we achieve omnidirectional image super-resolution with both fidelity and realness, dubbed as OmniSSR. Firstly, we transform the equirectangular projection (ERP) images into tangent projection (TP) images, whose distribution approximates the planar image domain. Then, we use SD to iteratively sample initial high-resolution results. At each denoising iteration, we further correct and update the initial results using the proposed Octadecaplex Tangent Information Interaction (OTII) and Gradient Decomposition (GD) technique to ensure better consistency. Finally, the TP images are transformed back to obtain the final high-resolution results. Our method is zero-shot, requiring no training or fine-tuning. Experiments of our method on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Realistic Saliency Guided Image Enhancement
Common editing operations performed by professional photographers include the cleanup operations: de-emphasizing distracting elements and enhancing subjects. These edits are challenging, requiring a delicate balance between manipulating the viewer's attention while maintaining photo realism. While recent approaches can boast successful examples of attention attenuation or amplification, most of them also suffer from frequent unrealistic edits. We propose a realism loss for saliency-guided image enhancement to maintain high realism across varying image types, while attenuating distractors and amplifying objects of interest. Evaluations with professional photographers confirm that we achieve the dual objective of realism and effectiveness, and outperform the recent approaches on their own datasets, while requiring a smaller memory footprint and runtime. We thus offer a viable solution for automating image enhancement and photo cleanup operations.
Click2Mask: Local Editing with Dynamic Mask Generation
Recent advancements in generative models have revolutionized image generation and editing, making these tasks accessible to non-experts. This paper focuses on local image editing, particularly the task of adding new content to a loosely specified area. Existing methods often require a precise mask or a detailed description of the location, which can be cumbersome and prone to errors. We propose Click2Mask, a novel approach that simplifies the local editing process by requiring only a single point of reference (in addition to the content description). A mask is dynamically grown around this point during a Blended Latent Diffusion (BLD) process, guided by a masked CLIP-based semantic loss. Click2Mask surpasses the limitations of segmentation-based and fine-tuning dependent methods, offering a more user-friendly and contextually accurate solution. Our experiments demonstrate that Click2Mask not only minimizes user effort but also delivers competitive or superior local image manipulation results compared to SoTA methods, according to both human judgement and automatic metrics. Key contributions include the simplification of user input, the ability to freely add objects unconstrained by existing segments, and the integration potential of our dynamic mask approach within other editing methods.
Screentone-Preserved Manga Retargeting
As a popular comic style, manga offers a unique impression by utilizing a rich set of bitonal patterns, or screentones, for illustration. However, screentones can easily be contaminated with visual-unpleasant aliasing and/or blurriness after resampling, which harms its visualization on displays of diverse resolutions. To address this problem, we propose the first manga retargeting method that synthesizes a rescaled manga image while retaining the screentone in each screened region. This is a non-trivial task as accurate region-wise segmentation remains challenging. Fortunately, the rescaled manga shares the same region-wise screentone correspondences with the original manga, which enables us to simplify the screentone synthesis problem as an anchor-based proposals selection and rearrangement problem. Specifically, we design a novel manga sampling strategy to generate aliasing-free screentone proposals, based on hierarchical grid-based anchors that connect the correspondences between the original and the target rescaled manga. Furthermore, a Recurrent Proposal Selection Module (RPSM) is proposed to adaptively integrate these proposals for target screentone synthesis. Besides, to deal with the translation insensitivity nature of screentones, we propose a translation-invariant screentone loss to facilitate the training convergence. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our method, and notably compelling results are achieved compared to existing alternative techniques.
MaGIC: Multi-modality Guided Image Completion
Vanilla image completion approaches exhibit sensitivity to large missing regions, attributed to the limited availability of reference information for plausible generation. To mitigate this, existing methods incorporate the extra cue as a guidance for image completion. Despite improvements, these approaches are often restricted to employing a single modality (e.g., segmentation or sketch maps), which lacks scalability in leveraging multi-modality for more plausible completion. In this paper, we propose a novel, simple yet effective method for Multi-modal Guided Image Completion, dubbed MaGIC, which not only supports a wide range of single modality as the guidance (e.g., text, canny edge, sketch, segmentation, depth, and pose), but also adapts to arbitrarily customized combination of these modalities (i.e., arbitrary multi-modality) for image completion. For building MaGIC, we first introduce a modality-specific conditional U-Net (MCU-Net) that injects single-modal signal into a U-Net denoiser for single-modal guided image completion. Then, we devise a consistent modality blending (CMB) method to leverage modality signals encoded in multiple learned MCU-Nets through gradient guidance in latent space. Our CMB is training-free, thereby avoids the cumbersome joint re-training of different modalities, which is the secret of MaGIC to achieve exceptional flexibility in accommodating new modalities for completion. Experiments show the superiority of MaGIC over state-of-the-art methods and its generalization to various completion tasks. Our project with code and models is available at yeates.github.io/MaGIC-Page/.
Heteroscedastic Uncertainty Estimation Framework for Unsupervised Registration
Deep learning methods for unsupervised registration often rely on objectives that assume a uniform noise level across the spatial domain (e.g. mean-squared error loss), but noise distributions are often heteroscedastic and input-dependent in real-world medical images. Thus, this assumption often leads to degradation in registration performance, mainly due to the undesired influence of noise-induced outliers. To mitigate this, we propose a framework for heteroscedastic image uncertainty estimation that can adaptively reduce the influence of regions with high uncertainty during unsupervised registration. The framework consists of a collaborative training strategy for the displacement and variance estimators, and a novel image fidelity weighting scheme utilizing signal-to-noise ratios. Our approach prevents the model from being driven away by spurious gradients caused by the simplified homoscedastic assumption, leading to more accurate displacement estimation. To illustrate its versatility and effectiveness, we tested our framework on two representative registration architectures across three medical image datasets. Our method consistently outperforms baselines and produces sensible uncertainty estimates. The code is publicly available at https://voldemort108x.github.io/hetero_uncertainty/.
Improving Geo-diversity of Generated Images with Contextualized Vendi Score Guidance
With the growing popularity of text-to-image generative models, there has been increasing focus on understanding their risks and biases. Recent work has found that state-of-the-art models struggle to depict everyday objects with the true diversity of the real world and have notable gaps between geographic regions. In this work, we aim to increase the diversity of generated images of common objects such that per-region variations are representative of the real world. We introduce an inference time intervention, contextualized Vendi Score Guidance (c-VSG), that guides the backwards steps of latent diffusion models to increase the diversity of a sample as compared to a "memory bank" of previously generated images while constraining the amount of variation within that of an exemplar set of real-world contextualizing images. We evaluate c-VSG with two geographically representative datasets and find that it substantially increases the diversity of generated images, both for the worst performing regions and on average, while simultaneously maintaining or improving image quality and consistency. Additionally, qualitative analyses reveal that diversity of generated images is significantly improved, including along the lines of reductive region portrayals present in the original model. We hope that this work is a step towards text-to-image generative models that reflect the true geographic diversity of the world.
Focus on Your Instruction: Fine-grained and Multi-instruction Image Editing by Attention Modulation
Recently, diffusion-based methods, like InstructPix2Pix (IP2P), have achieved effective instruction-based image editing, requiring only natural language instructions from the user. However, these methods often inadvertently alter unintended areas and struggle with multi-instruction editing, resulting in compromised outcomes. To address these issues, we introduce the Focus on Your Instruction (FoI), a method designed to ensure precise and harmonious editing across multiple instructions without extra training or test-time optimization. In the FoI, we primarily emphasize two aspects: (1) precisely extracting regions of interest for each instruction and (2) guiding the denoising process to concentrate within these regions of interest. For the first objective, we identify the implicit grounding capability of IP2P from the cross-attention between instruction and image, then develop an effective mask extraction method. For the second objective, we introduce a cross attention modulation module for rough isolation of target editing regions and unrelated regions. Additionally, we introduce a mask-guided disentangle sampling strategy to further ensure clear region isolation. Experimental results demonstrate that FoI surpasses existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, especially excelling in multi-instruction editing task.
Interpolating between Images with Diffusion Models
One little-explored frontier of image generation and editing is the task of interpolating between two input images, a feature missing from all currently deployed image generation pipelines. We argue that such a feature can expand the creative applications of such models, and propose a method for zero-shot interpolation using latent diffusion models. We apply interpolation in the latent space at a sequence of decreasing noise levels, then perform denoising conditioned on interpolated text embeddings derived from textual inversion and (optionally) subject poses. For greater consistency, or to specify additional criteria, we can generate several candidates and use CLIP to select the highest quality image. We obtain convincing interpolations across diverse subject poses, image styles, and image content, and show that standard quantitative metrics such as FID are insufficient to measure the quality of an interpolation. Code and data are available at https://clintonjwang.github.io/interpolation.
LoMOE: Localized Multi-Object Editing via Multi-Diffusion
Recent developments in the field of diffusion models have demonstrated an exceptional capacity to generate high-quality prompt-conditioned image edits. Nevertheless, previous approaches have primarily relied on textual prompts for image editing, which tend to be less effective when making precise edits to specific objects or fine-grained regions within a scene containing single/multiple objects. We introduce a novel framework for zero-shot localized multi-object editing through a multi-diffusion process to overcome this challenge. This framework empowers users to perform various operations on objects within an image, such as adding, replacing, or editing many objects in a complex scene in one pass. Our approach leverages foreground masks and corresponding simple text prompts that exert localized influences on the target regions resulting in high-fidelity image editing. A combination of cross-attention and background preservation losses within the latent space ensures that the characteristics of the object being edited are preserved while simultaneously achieving a high-quality, seamless reconstruction of the background with fewer artifacts compared to the current methods. We also curate and release a dataset dedicated to multi-object editing, named LoMOE-Bench. Our experiments against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the improved effectiveness of our approach in terms of both image editing quality and inference speed.
Assessing the Efficacy of Invisible Watermarks in AI-Generated Medical Images
AI-generated medical images are gaining growing popularity due to their potential to address the data scarcity challenge in the real world. However, the issue of accurate identification of these synthetic images, particularly when they exhibit remarkable realism with their real copies, remains a concern. To mitigate this challenge, image generators such as DALLE and Imagen, have integrated digital watermarks aimed at facilitating the discernment of synthetic images' authenticity. These watermarks are embedded within the image pixels and are invisible to the human eye while remains their detectability. Nevertheless, a comprehensive investigation into the potential impact of these invisible watermarks on the utility of synthetic medical images has been lacking. In this study, we propose the incorporation of invisible watermarks into synthetic medical images and seek to evaluate their efficacy in the context of downstream classification tasks. Our goal is to pave the way for discussions on the viability of such watermarks in boosting the detectability of synthetic medical images, fortifying ethical standards, and safeguarding against data pollution and potential scams.
Devil is in the Queries: Advancing Mask Transformers for Real-world Medical Image Segmentation and Out-of-Distribution Localization
Real-world medical image segmentation has tremendous long-tailed complexity of objects, among which tail conditions correlate with relatively rare diseases and are clinically significant. A trustworthy medical AI algorithm should demonstrate its effectiveness on tail conditions to avoid clinically dangerous damage in these out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. In this paper, we adopt the concept of object queries in Mask Transformers to formulate semantic segmentation as a soft cluster assignment. The queries fit the feature-level cluster centers of inliers during training. Therefore, when performing inference on a medical image in real-world scenarios, the similarity between pixels and the queries detects and localizes OOD regions. We term this OOD localization as MaxQuery. Furthermore, the foregrounds of real-world medical images, whether OOD objects or inliers, are lesions. The difference between them is less than that between the foreground and background, possibly misleading the object queries to focus redundantly on the background. Thus, we propose a query-distribution (QD) loss to enforce clear boundaries between segmentation targets and other regions at the query level, improving the inlier segmentation and OOD indication. Our proposed framework is tested on two real-world segmentation tasks, i.e., segmentation of pancreatic and liver tumors, outperforming previous state-of-the-art algorithms by an average of 7.39% on AUROC, 14.69% on AUPR, and 13.79% on FPR95 for OOD localization. On the other hand, our framework improves the performance of inlier segmentation by an average of 5.27% DSC when compared with the leading baseline nnUNet.
Detailed Annotations of Chest X-Rays via CT Projection for Report Understanding
In clinical radiology reports, doctors capture important information about the patient's health status. They convey their observations from raw medical imaging data about the inner structures of a patient. As such, formulating reports requires medical experts to possess wide-ranging knowledge about anatomical regions with their normal, healthy appearance as well as the ability to recognize abnormalities. This explicit grasp on both the patient's anatomy and their appearance is missing in current medical image-processing systems as annotations are especially difficult to gather. This renders the models to be narrow experts e.g. for identifying specific diseases. In this work, we recover this missing link by adding human anatomy into the mix and enable the association of content in medical reports to their occurrence in associated imagery (medical phrase grounding). To exploit anatomical structures in this scenario, we present a sophisticated automatic pipeline to gather and integrate human bodily structures from computed tomography datasets, which we incorporate in our PAXRay: A Projected dataset for the segmentation of Anatomical structures in X-Ray data. Our evaluation shows that methods that take advantage of anatomical information benefit heavily in visually grounding radiologists' findings, as our anatomical segmentations allow for up to absolute 50% better grounding results on the OpenI dataset as compared to commonly used region proposals. The PAXRay dataset is available at https://constantinseibold.github.io/paxray/.
Paint by Example: Exemplar-based Image Editing with Diffusion Models
Language-guided image editing has achieved great success recently. In this paper, for the first time, we investigate exemplar-guided image editing for more precise control. We achieve this goal by leveraging self-supervised training to disentangle and re-organize the source image and the exemplar. However, the naive approach will cause obvious fusing artifacts. We carefully analyze it and propose an information bottleneck and strong augmentations to avoid the trivial solution of directly copying and pasting the exemplar image. Meanwhile, to ensure the controllability of the editing process, we design an arbitrary shape mask for the exemplar image and leverage the classifier-free guidance to increase the similarity to the exemplar image. The whole framework involves a single forward of the diffusion model without any iterative optimization. We demonstrate that our method achieves an impressive performance and enables controllable editing on in-the-wild images with high fidelity.
Factorized Diffusion: Perceptual Illusions by Noise Decomposition
Given a factorization of an image into a sum of linear components, we present a zero-shot method to control each individual component through diffusion model sampling. For example, we can decompose an image into low and high spatial frequencies and condition these components on different text prompts. This produces hybrid images, which change appearance depending on viewing distance. By decomposing an image into three frequency subbands, we can generate hybrid images with three prompts. We also use a decomposition into grayscale and color components to produce images whose appearance changes when they are viewed in grayscale, a phenomena that naturally occurs under dim lighting. And we explore a decomposition by a motion blur kernel, which produces images that change appearance under motion blurring. Our method works by denoising with a composite noise estimate, built from the components of noise estimates conditioned on different prompts. We also show that for certain decompositions, our method recovers prior approaches to compositional generation and spatial control. Finally, we show that we can extend our approach to generate hybrid images from real images. We do this by holding one component fixed and generating the remaining components, effectively solving an inverse problem.
Semi-Truths: A Large-Scale Dataset of AI-Augmented Images for Evaluating Robustness of AI-Generated Image detectors
Text-to-image diffusion models have impactful applications in art, design, and entertainment, yet these technologies also pose significant risks by enabling the creation and dissemination of misinformation. Although recent advancements have produced AI-generated image detectors that claim robustness against various augmentations, their true effectiveness remains uncertain. Do these detectors reliably identify images with different levels of augmentation? Are they biased toward specific scenes or data distributions? To investigate, we introduce SEMI-TRUTHS, featuring 27,600 real images, 223,400 masks, and 1,472,700 AI-augmented images that feature targeted and localized perturbations produced using diverse augmentation techniques, diffusion models, and data distributions. Each augmented image is accompanied by metadata for standardized and targeted evaluation of detector robustness. Our findings suggest that state-of-the-art detectors exhibit varying sensitivities to the types and degrees of perturbations, data distributions, and augmentation methods used, offering new insights into their performance and limitations. The code for the augmentation and evaluation pipeline is available at https://github.com/J-Kruk/SemiTruths.
InstructGIE: Towards Generalizable Image Editing
Recent advances in image editing have been driven by the development of denoising diffusion models, marking a significant leap forward in this field. Despite these advances, the generalization capabilities of recent image editing approaches remain constrained. In response to this challenge, our study introduces a novel image editing framework with enhanced generalization robustness by boosting in-context learning capability and unifying language instruction. This framework incorporates a module specifically optimized for image editing tasks, leveraging the VMamba Block and an editing-shift matching strategy to augment in-context learning. Furthermore, we unveil a selective area-matching technique specifically engineered to address and rectify corrupted details in generated images, such as human facial features, to further improve the quality. Another key innovation of our approach is the integration of a language unification technique, which aligns language embeddings with editing semantics to elevate the quality of image editing. Moreover, we compile the first dataset for image editing with visual prompts and editing instructions that could be used to enhance in-context capability. Trained on this dataset, our methodology not only achieves superior synthesis quality for trained tasks, but also demonstrates robust generalization capability across unseen vision tasks through tailored prompts.
PNI : Industrial Anomaly Detection using Position and Neighborhood Information
Because anomalous samples cannot be used for training, many anomaly detection and localization methods use pre-trained networks and non-parametric modeling to estimate encoded feature distribution. However, these methods neglect the impact of position and neighborhood information on the distribution of normal features. To overcome this, we propose a new algorithm, PNI, which estimates the normal distribution using conditional probability given neighborhood features, modeled with a multi-layer perceptron network. Moreover, position information is utilized by creating a histogram of representative features at each position. Instead of simply resizing the anomaly map, the proposed method employs an additional refine network trained on synthetic anomaly images to better interpolate and account for the shape and edge of the input image. We conducted experiments on the MVTec AD benchmark dataset and achieved state-of-the-art performance, with 99.56\% and 98.98\% AUROC scores in anomaly detection and localization, respectively.
Towards Fairer Datasets: Filtering and Balancing the Distribution of the People Subtree in the ImageNet Hierarchy
Computer vision technology is being used by many but remains representative of only a few. People have reported misbehavior of computer vision models, including offensive prediction results and lower performance for underrepresented groups. Current computer vision models are typically developed using datasets consisting of manually annotated images or videos; the data and label distributions in these datasets are critical to the models' behavior. In this paper, we examine ImageNet, a large-scale ontology of images that has spurred the development of many modern computer vision methods. We consider three key factors within the "person" subtree of ImageNet that may lead to problematic behavior in downstream computer vision technology: (1) the stagnant concept vocabulary of WordNet, (2) the attempt at exhaustive illustration of all categories with images, and (3) the inequality of representation in the images within concepts. We seek to illuminate the root causes of these concerns and take the first steps to mitigate them constructively.
Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations
A key requirement for the success of supervised deep learning is a large labeled dataset - a condition that is difficult to meet in medical image analysis. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can help in this regard by providing a strategy to pre-train a neural network with unlabeled data, followed by fine-tuning for a downstream task with limited annotations. Contrastive learning, a particular variant of SSL, is a powerful technique for learning image-level representations. In this work, we propose strategies for extending the contrastive learning framework for segmentation of volumetric medical images in the semi-supervised setting with limited annotations, by leveraging domain-specific and problem-specific cues. Specifically, we propose (1) novel contrasting strategies that leverage structural similarity across volumetric medical images (domain-specific cue) and (2) a local version of the contrastive loss to learn distinctive representations of local regions that are useful for per-pixel segmentation (problem-specific cue). We carry out an extensive evaluation on three Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets. In the limited annotation setting, the proposed method yields substantial improvements compared to other self-supervision and semi-supervised learning techniques. When combined with a simple data augmentation technique, the proposed method reaches within 8% of benchmark performance using only two labeled MRI volumes for training, corresponding to only 4% (for ACDC) of the training data used to train the benchmark. The code is made public at https://github.com/krishnabits001/domain_specific_cl.
RobustSAM: Segment Anything Robustly on Degraded Images
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has emerged as a transformative approach in image segmentation, acclaimed for its robust zero-shot segmentation capabilities and flexible prompting system. Nonetheless, its performance is challenged by images with degraded quality. Addressing this limitation, we propose the Robust Segment Anything Model (RobustSAM), which enhances SAM's performance on low-quality images while preserving its promptability and zero-shot generalization. Our method leverages the pre-trained SAM model with only marginal parameter increments and computational requirements. The additional parameters of RobustSAM can be optimized within 30 hours on eight GPUs, demonstrating its feasibility and practicality for typical research laboratories. We also introduce the Robust-Seg dataset, a collection of 688K image-mask pairs with different degradations designed to train and evaluate our model optimally. Extensive experiments across various segmentation tasks and datasets confirm RobustSAM's superior performance, especially under zero-shot conditions, underscoring its potential for extensive real-world application. Additionally, our method has been shown to effectively improve the performance of SAM-based downstream tasks such as single image dehazing and deblurring.
iColoriT: Towards Propagating Local Hint to the Right Region in Interactive Colorization by Leveraging Vision Transformer
Point-interactive image colorization aims to colorize grayscale images when a user provides the colors for specific locations. It is essential for point-interactive colorization methods to appropriately propagate user-provided colors (i.e., user hints) in the entire image to obtain a reasonably colorized image with minimal user effort. However, existing approaches often produce partially colorized results due to the inefficient design of stacking convolutional layers to propagate hints to distant relevant regions. To address this problem, we present iColoriT, a novel point-interactive colorization Vision Transformer capable of propagating user hints to relevant regions, leveraging the global receptive field of Transformers. The self-attention mechanism of Transformers enables iColoriT to selectively colorize relevant regions with only a few local hints. Our approach colorizes images in real-time by utilizing pixel shuffling, an efficient upsampling technique that replaces the decoder architecture. Also, in order to mitigate the artifacts caused by pixel shuffling with large upsampling ratios, we present the local stabilizing layer. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our approach highly outperforms existing methods for point-interactive colorization, producing accurately colorized images with a user's minimal effort. Official codes are available at https://pmh9960.github.io/research/iColoriT
Tokenize Anything via Prompting
We present a unified, promptable model capable of simultaneously segmenting, recognizing, and captioning anything. Unlike SAM, we aim to build a versatile region representation in the wild via visual prompting. To achieve this, we train a generalizable model with massive segmentation masks, e.g., SA-1B masks, and semantic priors from a pre-trained CLIP model with 5 billion parameters. Specifically, we construct a promptable image decoder by adding a semantic token to each mask token. The semantic token is responsible for learning the semantic priors in a predefined concept space. Through joint optimization of segmentation on mask tokens and concept prediction on semantic tokens, our model exhibits strong regional recognition and localization capabilities. For example, an additional 38M-parameter causal text decoder trained from scratch sets a new record with a CIDEr score of 150.7 on the Visual Genome region captioning task. We believe this model can be a versatile region-level image tokenizer, capable of encoding general-purpose region context for a broad range of perception tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/baaivision/tokenize-anything.
Saliency Can Be All You Need In Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning
We propose an augmentation policy for Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) in the form of an already established Salient Image Segmentation technique entitled Global Contrast based Salient Region Detection. This detection technique, which had been devised for unrelated Computer Vision tasks, was empirically observed to play the role of an augmentation facilitator within the SSL protocol. This observation is rooted in our practical attempts to learn, by SSL-fashion, aerial imagery of solar panels, which exhibit challenging boundary patterns. Upon the successful integration of this technique on our problem domain, we formulated a generalized procedure and conducted a comprehensive, systematic performance assessment with various Contrastive SSL algorithms subject to standard augmentation techniques. This evaluation, which was conducted across multiple datasets, indicated that the proposed technique indeed contributes to SSL. We hypothesize whether salient image segmentation may suffice as the only augmentation policy in Contrastive SSL when treating downstream segmentation tasks.
AccDiffusion: An Accurate Method for Higher-Resolution Image Generation
This paper attempts to address the object repetition issue in patch-wise higher-resolution image generation. We propose AccDiffusion, an accurate method for patch-wise higher-resolution image generation without training. An in-depth analysis in this paper reveals an identical text prompt for different patches causes repeated object generation, while no prompt compromises the image details. Therefore, our AccDiffusion, for the first time, proposes to decouple the vanilla image-content-aware prompt into a set of patch-content-aware prompts, each of which serves as a more precise description of an image patch. Besides, AccDiffusion also introduces dilated sampling with window interaction for better global consistency in higher-resolution image generation. Experimental comparison with existing methods demonstrates that our AccDiffusion effectively addresses the issue of repeated object generation and leads to better performance in higher-resolution image generation.
SpaText: Spatio-Textual Representation for Controllable Image Generation
Recent text-to-image diffusion models are able to generate convincing results of unprecedented quality. However, it is nearly impossible to control the shapes of different regions/objects or their layout in a fine-grained fashion. Previous attempts to provide such controls were hindered by their reliance on a fixed set of labels. To this end, we present SpaText - a new method for text-to-image generation using open-vocabulary scene control. In addition to a global text prompt that describes the entire scene, the user provides a segmentation map where each region of interest is annotated by a free-form natural language description. Due to lack of large-scale datasets that have a detailed textual description for each region in the image, we choose to leverage the current large-scale text-to-image datasets and base our approach on a novel CLIP-based spatio-textual representation, and show its effectiveness on two state-of-the-art diffusion models: pixel-based and latent-based. In addition, we show how to extend the classifier-free guidance method in diffusion models to the multi-conditional case and present an alternative accelerated inference algorithm. Finally, we offer several automatic evaluation metrics and use them, in addition to FID scores and a user study, to evaluate our method and show that it achieves state-of-the-art results on image generation with free-form textual scene control.
Prostate-Specific Foundation Models for Enhanced Detection of Clinically Significant Cancer
Accurate prostate cancer diagnosis remains challenging. Even when using MRI, radiologists exhibit low specificity and significant inter-observer variability, leading to potential delays or inaccuracies in identifying clinically significant cancers. This leads to numerous unnecessary biopsies and risks of missing clinically significant cancers. Here we present prostate vision contrastive network (ProViCNet), prostate organ-specific vision foundation models for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Trans-Rectal Ultrasound imaging (TRUS) for comprehensive cancer detection. ProViCNet was trained and validated using 4,401 patients across six institutions, as a prostate cancer detection model on radiology images relying on patch-level contrastive learning guided by biopsy confirmed radiologist annotations. ProViCNet demonstrated consistent performance across multiple internal and external validation cohorts with area under the receiver operating curve values ranging from 0.875 to 0.966, significantly outperforming radiologists in the reader study (0.907 versus 0.805, p<0.001) for mpMRI, while achieving 0.670 to 0.740 for TRUS. We also integrated ProViCNet with standard PSA to develop a virtual screening test, and we showed that we can maintain the high sensitivity for detecting clinically significant cancers while more than doubling specificity from 15% to 38% (p<0.001), thereby substantially reducing unnecessary biopsies. These findings highlight that ProViCNet's potential for enhancing prostate cancer diagnosis accuracy and reduce unnecessary biopsies, thereby optimizing diagnostic pathways.
SAM-DiffSR: Structure-Modulated Diffusion Model for Image Super-Resolution
Diffusion-based super-resolution (SR) models have recently garnered significant attention due to their potent restoration capabilities. But conventional diffusion models perform noise sampling from a single distribution, constraining their ability to handle real-world scenes and complex textures across semantic regions. With the success of segment anything model (SAM), generating sufficiently fine-grained region masks can enhance the detail recovery of diffusion-based SR model. However, directly integrating SAM into SR models will result in much higher computational cost. In this paper, we propose the SAM-DiffSR model, which can utilize the fine-grained structure information from SAM in the process of sampling noise to improve the image quality without additional computational cost during inference. In the process of training, we encode structural position information into the segmentation mask from SAM. Then the encoded mask is integrated into the forward diffusion process by modulating it to the sampled noise. This adjustment allows us to independently adapt the noise mean within each corresponding segmentation area. The diffusion model is trained to estimate this modulated noise. Crucially, our proposed framework does NOT change the reverse diffusion process and does NOT require SAM at inference. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, showcasing superior performance in suppressing artifacts, and surpassing existing diffusion-based methods by 0.74 dB at the maximum in terms of PSNR on DIV2K dataset. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/lose4578/SAM-DiffSR.
Accelerating Image Super-Resolution Networks with Pixel-Level Classification
In recent times, the need for effective super-resolution (SR) techniques has surged, especially for large-scale images ranging 2K to 8K resolutions. For DNN-based SISR, decomposing images into overlapping patches is typically necessary due to computational constraints. In such patch-decomposing scheme, one can allocate computational resources differently based on each patch's difficulty to further improve efficiency while maintaining SR performance. However, this approach has a limitation: computational resources is uniformly allocated within a patch, leading to lower efficiency when the patch contain pixels with varying levels of restoration difficulty. To address the issue, we propose the Pixel-level Classifier for Single Image Super-Resolution (PCSR), a novel method designed to distribute computational resources adaptively at the pixel level. A PCSR model comprises a backbone, a pixel-level classifier, and a set of pixel-level upsamplers with varying capacities. The pixel-level classifier assigns each pixel to an appropriate upsampler based on its restoration difficulty, thereby optimizing computational resource usage. Our method allows for performance and computational cost balance during inference without re-training. Our experiments demonstrate PCSR's advantage over existing patch-distributing methods in PSNR-FLOP trade-offs across different backbone models and benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/3587jjh/PCSR.
3CAD: A Large-Scale Real-World 3C Product Dataset for Unsupervised Anomaly
Industrial anomaly detection achieves progress thanks to datasets such as MVTec-AD and VisA. However, they suf- fer from limitations in terms of the number of defect sam- ples, types of defects, and availability of real-world scenes. These constraints inhibit researchers from further exploring the performance of industrial detection with higher accuracy. To this end, we propose a new large-scale anomaly detection dataset called 3CAD, which is derived from real 3C produc- tion lines. Specifically, the proposed 3CAD includes eight different types of manufactured parts, totaling 27,039 high- resolution images labeled with pixel-level anomalies. The key features of 3CAD are that it covers anomalous regions of different sizes, multiple anomaly types, and the possibility of multiple anomalous regions and multiple anomaly types per anomaly image. This is the largest and first anomaly de- tection dataset dedicated to 3C product quality control for community exploration and development. Meanwhile, we in- troduce a simple yet effective framework for unsupervised anomaly detection: a Coarse-to-Fine detection paradigm with Recovery Guidance (CFRG). To detect small defect anoma- lies, the proposed CFRG utilizes a coarse-to-fine detection paradigm. Specifically, we utilize a heterogeneous distilla- tion model for coarse localization and then fine localiza- tion through a segmentation model. In addition, to better capture normal patterns, we introduce recovery features as guidance. Finally, we report the results of our CFRG frame- work and popular anomaly detection methods on the 3CAD dataset, demonstrating strong competitiveness and providing a highly challenging benchmark to promote the development of the anomaly detection field. Data and code are available: https://github.com/EnquanYang2022/3CAD.
Deep Inception Generative Network for Cognitive Image Inpainting
Recent advances in deep learning have shown exciting promise in filling large holes and lead to another orientation for image inpainting. However, existing learning-based methods often create artifacts and fallacious textures because of insufficient cognition understanding. Previous generative networks are limited with single receptive type and give up pooling in consideration of detail sharpness. Human cognition is constant regardless of the target attribute. As multiple receptive fields improve the ability of abstract image characterization and pooling can keep feature invariant, specifically, deep inception learning is adopted to promote high-level feature representation and enhance model learning capacity for local patches. Moreover, approaches for generating diverse mask images are introduced and a random mask dataset is created. We benchmark our methods on ImageNet, Places2 dataset, and CelebA-HQ. Experiments for regular, irregular, and custom regions completion are all performed and free-style image inpainting is also presented. Quantitative comparisons with previous state-of-the-art methods show that ours obtain much more natural image completions.
Promising or Elusive? Unsupervised Object Segmentation from Real-world Single Images
In this paper, we study the problem of unsupervised object segmentation from single images. We do not introduce a new algorithm, but systematically investigate the effectiveness of existing unsupervised models on challenging real-world images. We firstly introduce four complexity factors to quantitatively measure the distributions of object- and scene-level biases in appearance and geometry for datasets with human annotations. With the aid of these factors, we empirically find that, not surprisingly, existing unsupervised models catastrophically fail to segment generic objects in real-world images, although they can easily achieve excellent performance on numerous simple synthetic datasets, due to the vast gap in objectness biases between synthetic and real images. By conducting extensive experiments on multiple groups of ablated real-world datasets, we ultimately find that the key factors underlying the colossal failure of existing unsupervised models on real-world images are the challenging distributions of object- and scene-level biases in appearance and geometry. Because of this, the inductive biases introduced in existing unsupervised models can hardly capture the diverse object distributions. Our research results suggest that future work should exploit more explicit objectness biases in the network design.
Multiscale Score Matching for Out-of-Distribution Detection
We present a new methodology for detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) images by utilizing norms of the score estimates at multiple noise scales. A score is defined to be the gradient of the log density with respect to the input data. Our methodology is completely unsupervised and follows a straight forward training scheme. First, we train a deep network to estimate scores for levels of noise. Once trained, we calculate the noisy score estimates for N in-distribution samples and take the L2-norms across the input dimensions (resulting in an NxL matrix). Then we train an auxiliary model (such as a Gaussian Mixture Model) to learn the in-distribution spatial regions in this L-dimensional space. This auxiliary model can now be used to identify points that reside outside the learned space. Despite its simplicity, our experiments show that this methodology significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in detecting out-of-distribution images. For example, our method can effectively separate CIFAR-10 (inlier) and SVHN (OOD) images, a setting which has been previously shown to be difficult for deep likelihood models.
Vision-guided and Mask-enhanced Adaptive Denoising for Prompt-based Image Editing
Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable progress in synthesizing high-quality images from text prompts, which boosts researches on prompt-based image editing that edits a source image according to a target prompt. Despite their advances, existing methods still encounter three key issues: 1) limited capacity of the text prompt in guiding target image generation, 2) insufficient mining of word-to-patch and patch-to-patch relationships for grounding editing areas, and 3) unified editing strength for all regions during each denoising step. To address these issues, we present a Vision-guided and Mask-enhanced Adaptive Editing (ViMAEdit) method with three key novel designs. First, we propose to leverage image embeddings as explicit guidance to enhance the conventional textual prompt-based denoising process, where a CLIP-based target image embedding estimation strategy is introduced. Second, we devise a self-attention-guided iterative editing area grounding strategy, which iteratively exploits patch-to-patch relationships conveyed by self-attention maps to refine those word-to-patch relationships contained in cross-attention maps. Last, we present a spatially adaptive variance-guided sampling, which highlights sampling variances for critical image regions to promote the editing capability. Experimental results demonstrate the superior editing capacity of ViMAEdit over all existing methods.
Towards Latent Masked Image Modeling for Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning
Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has emerged as a promising method for deriving visual representations from unlabeled image data by predicting missing pixels from masked portions of images. It excels in region-aware learning and provides strong initializations for various tasks, but struggles to capture high-level semantics without further supervised fine-tuning, likely due to the low-level nature of its pixel reconstruction objective. A promising yet unrealized framework is learning representations through masked reconstruction in latent space, combining the locality of MIM with the high-level targets. However, this approach poses significant training challenges as the reconstruction targets are learned in conjunction with the model, potentially leading to trivial or suboptimal solutions.Our study is among the first to thoroughly analyze and address the challenges of such framework, which we refer to as Latent MIM. Through a series of carefully designed experiments and extensive analysis, we identify the source of these challenges, including representation collapsing for joint online/target optimization, learning objectives, the high region correlation in latent space and decoding conditioning. By sequentially addressing these issues, we demonstrate that Latent MIM can indeed learn high-level representations while retaining the benefits of MIM models.
YCB-LUMA: YCB Object Dataset with Luminance Keying for Object Localization
Localizing target objects in images is an important task in computer vision. Often it is the first step towards solving a variety of applications in autonomous driving, maintenance, quality insurance, robotics, and augmented reality. Best in class solutions for this task rely on deep neural networks, which require a set of representative training data for best performance. Creating sets of sufficient quality, variety, and size is often difficult, error prone, and expensive. This is where the method of luminance keying can help: it provides a simple yet effective solution to record high quality data for training object detection and segmentation. We extend previous work that presented luminance keying on the common YCB-V set of household objects by recording the remaining objects of the YCB superset. The additional variety of objects - addition of transparency, multiple color variations, non-rigid objects - further demonstrates the usefulness of luminance keying and might be used to test the applicability of the approach on new 2D object detection and segmentation algorithms.
Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4V
We present Set-of-Mark (SoM), a new visual prompting method, to unleash the visual grounding abilities of large multimodal models (LMMs), such as GPT-4V. As illustrated in Fig. 1 (right), we employ off-the-shelf interactive segmentation models, such as SAM, to partition an image into regions at different levels of granularity, and overlay these regions with a set of marks e.g., alphanumerics, masks, boxes. Using the marked image as input, GPT-4V can answer the questions that require visual grounding. We perform a comprehensive empirical study to validate the effectiveness of SoM on a wide range of fine-grained vision and multimodal tasks. For example, our experiments show that GPT-4V with SoM outperforms the state-of-the-art fully-finetuned referring segmentation model on RefCOCOg in a zero-shot setting.
Anywhere: A Multi-Agent Framework for Reliable and Diverse Foreground-Conditioned Image Inpainting
Recent advancements in image inpainting, particularly through diffusion modeling, have yielded promising outcomes. However, when tested in scenarios involving the completion of images based on the foreground objects, current methods that aim to inpaint an image in an end-to-end manner encounter challenges such as "over-imagination", inconsistency between foreground and background, and limited diversity. In response, we introduce Anywhere, a pioneering multi-agent framework designed to address these issues. Anywhere utilizes a sophisticated pipeline framework comprising various agents such as Visual Language Model (VLM), Large Language Model (LLM), and image generation models. This framework consists of three principal components: the prompt generation module, the image generation module, and the outcome analyzer. The prompt generation module conducts a semantic analysis of the input foreground image, leveraging VLM to predict relevant language descriptions and LLM to recommend optimal language prompts. In the image generation module, we employ a text-guided canny-to-image generation model to create a template image based on the edge map of the foreground image and language prompts, and an image refiner to produce the outcome by blending the input foreground and the template image. The outcome analyzer employs VLM to evaluate image content rationality, aesthetic score, and foreground-background relevance, triggering prompt and image regeneration as needed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Anywhere framework excels in foreground-conditioned image inpainting, mitigating "over-imagination", resolving foreground-background discrepancies, and enhancing diversity. It successfully elevates foreground-conditioned image inpainting to produce more reliable and diverse results.
AdapterShadow: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Shadow Detection
Segment anything model (SAM) has shown its spectacular performance in segmenting universal objects, especially when elaborate prompts are provided. However, the drawback of SAM is twofold. On the first hand, it fails to segment specific targets, e.g., shadow images or lesions in medical images. On the other hand, manually specifying prompts is extremely time-consuming. To overcome the problems, we propose AdapterShadow, which adapts SAM model for shadow detection. To adapt SAM for shadow images, trainable adapters are inserted into the frozen image encoder of SAM, since the training of the full SAM model is both time and memory consuming. Moreover, we introduce a novel grid sampling method to generate dense point prompts, which helps to automatically segment shadows without any manual interventions. Extensive experiments are conducted on four widely used benchmark datasets to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method. Codes will are publicly available at https://github.com/LeipingJie/AdapterShadow.
Cross-Ray Neural Radiance Fields for Novel-view Synthesis from Unconstrained Image Collections
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is a revolutionary approach for rendering scenes by sampling a single ray per pixel and it has demonstrated impressive capabilities in novel-view synthesis from static scene images. However, in practice, we usually need to recover NeRF from unconstrained image collections, which poses two challenges: 1) the images often have dynamic changes in appearance because of different capturing time and camera settings; 2) the images may contain transient objects such as humans and cars, leading to occlusion and ghosting artifacts. Conventional approaches seek to address these challenges by locally utilizing a single ray to synthesize a color of a pixel. In contrast, humans typically perceive appearance and objects by globally utilizing information across multiple pixels. To mimic the perception process of humans, in this paper, we propose Cross-Ray NeRF (CR-NeRF) that leverages interactive information across multiple rays to synthesize occlusion-free novel views with the same appearances as the images. Specifically, to model varying appearances, we first propose to represent multiple rays with a novel cross-ray feature and then recover the appearance by fusing global statistics, i.e., feature covariance of the rays and the image appearance. Moreover, to avoid occlusion introduced by transient objects, we propose a transient objects handler and introduce a grid sampling strategy for masking out the transient objects. We theoretically find that leveraging correlation across multiple rays promotes capturing more global information. Moreover, extensive experimental results on large real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of CR-NeRF.
Adaptive Cross-Layer Attention for Image Restoration
Non-local attention module has been proven to be crucial for image restoration. Conventional non-local attention processes features of each layer separately, so it risks missing correlation between features among different layers. To address this problem, we aim to design attention modules that aggregate information from different layers. Instead of finding correlated key pixels within the same layer, each query pixel is encouraged to attend to key pixels at multiple previous layers of the network. In order to efficiently embed such attention design into neural network backbones, we propose a novel Adaptive Cross-Layer Attention (ACLA) module. Two adaptive designs are proposed for ACLA: (1) adaptively selecting the keys for non-local attention at each layer; (2) automatically searching for the insertion locations for ACLA modules. By these two adaptive designs, ACLA dynamically selects a flexible number of keys to be aggregated for non-local attention at previous layer while maintaining a compact neural network with compelling performance. Extensive experiments on image restoration tasks, including single image super-resolution, image denoising, image demosaicing, and image compression artifacts reduction, validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ACLA. The code of ACLA is available at https://github.com/SDL-ASU/ACLA.
AutoPaint: A Self-Inpainting Method for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
Robust and accurate detection and segmentation of heterogenous tumors appearing in different anatomical organs with supervised methods require large-scale labeled datasets covering all possible types of diseases. Due to the unavailability of such rich datasets and the high cost of annotations, unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) methods have been developed aiming to detect the pathologies as deviation from the normality by utilizing the unlabeled healthy image data. However, developed UAD models are often trained with an incomplete distribution of healthy anatomies and have difficulties in preserving anatomical constraints. This work intends to, first, propose a robust inpainting model to learn the details of healthy anatomies and reconstruct high-resolution images by preserving anatomical constraints. Second, we propose an autoinpainting pipeline to automatically detect tumors, replace their appearance with the learned healthy anatomies, and based on that segment the tumoral volumes in a purely unsupervised fashion. Three imaging datasets, including PET, CT, and PET-CT scans of lung tumors and head and neck tumors, are studied as benchmarks for evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the significant superiority of the proposed method over a wide range of state-of-the-art UAD methods. Moreover, the unsupervised method we propose produces comparable results to a robust supervised segmentation method when applied to multimodal images.
NoiseDiffusion: Correcting Noise for Image Interpolation with Diffusion Models beyond Spherical Linear Interpolation
Image interpolation based on diffusion models is promising in creating fresh and interesting images. Advanced interpolation methods mainly focus on spherical linear interpolation, where images are encoded into the noise space and then interpolated for denoising to images. However, existing methods face challenges in effectively interpolating natural images (not generated by diffusion models), thereby restricting their practical applicability. Our experimental investigations reveal that these challenges stem from the invalidity of the encoding noise, which may no longer obey the expected noise distribution, e.g., a normal distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach to correct noise for image interpolation, NoiseDiffusion. Specifically, NoiseDiffusion approaches the invalid noise to the expected distribution by introducing subtle Gaussian noise and introduces a constraint to suppress noise with extreme values. In this context, promoting noise validity contributes to mitigating image artifacts, but the constraint and introduced exogenous noise typically lead to a reduction in signal-to-noise ratio, i.e., loss of original image information. Hence, NoiseDiffusion performs interpolation within the noisy image space and injects raw images into these noisy counterparts to address the challenge of information loss. Consequently, NoiseDiffusion enables us to interpolate natural images without causing artifacts or information loss, thus achieving the best interpolation results.
Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks
We observe that despite their hierarchical convolutional nature, the synthesis process of typical generative adversarial networks depends on absolute pixel coordinates in an unhealthy manner. This manifests itself as, e.g., detail appearing to be glued to image coordinates instead of the surfaces of depicted objects. We trace the root cause to careless signal processing that causes aliasing in the generator network. Interpreting all signals in the network as continuous, we derive generally applicable, small architectural changes that guarantee that unwanted information cannot leak into the hierarchical synthesis process. The resulting networks match the FID of StyleGAN2 but differ dramatically in their internal representations, and they are fully equivariant to translation and rotation even at subpixel scales. Our results pave the way for generative models better suited for video and animation.
Diffusion360: Seamless 360 Degree Panoramic Image Generation based on Diffusion Models
This is a technical report on the 360-degree panoramic image generation task based on diffusion models. Unlike ordinary 2D images, 360-degree panoramic images capture the entire 360^circtimes 180^circ field of view. So the rightmost and the leftmost sides of the 360 panoramic image should be continued, which is the main challenge in this field. However, the current diffusion pipeline is not appropriate for generating such a seamless 360-degree panoramic image. To this end, we propose a circular blending strategy on both the denoising and VAE decoding stages to maintain the geometry continuity. Based on this, we present two models for Text-to-360-panoramas and Single-Image-to-360-panoramas tasks. The code has been released as an open-source project at https://github.com/ArcherFMY/SD-T2I-360PanoImage{https://github.com/ArcherFMY/SD-T2I-360PanoImage} and https://www.modelscope.cn/models/damo/cv_diffusion_text-to-360panorama-image_generation/summary{ModelScope}
Unleashing In-context Learning of Autoregressive Models for Few-shot Image Manipulation
Text-guided image manipulation has experienced notable advancement in recent years. In order to mitigate linguistic ambiguity, few-shot learning with visual examples has been applied for instructions that are underrepresented in the training set, or difficult to describe purely in language. However, learning from visual prompts requires strong reasoning capability, which diffusion models are struggling with. To address this issue, we introduce a novel multi-modal autoregressive model, dubbed InstaManip, that can instantly learn a new image manipulation operation from textual and visual guidance via in-context learning, and apply it to new query images. Specifically, we propose an innovative group self-attention mechanism to break down the in-context learning process into two separate stages -- learning and applying, which simplifies the complex problem into two easier tasks. We also introduce a relation regularization method to further disentangle image transformation features from irrelevant contents in exemplar images. Extensive experiments suggest that our method surpasses previous few-shot image manipulation models by a notable margin (geq19% in human evaluation). We also find our model can be further boosted by increasing the number or diversity of exemplar images.
FINECAPTION: Compositional Image Captioning Focusing on Wherever You Want at Any Granularity
The advent of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced multimodal tasks, enabling more sophisticated and accurate reasoning across various applications, including image and video captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. Despite their superior capabilities, VLMs struggle with fine-grained image regional composition information perception. Specifically, they have difficulty accurately aligning the segmentation masks with the corresponding semantics and precisely describing the compositional aspects of the referred regions. However, compositionality - the ability to understand and generate novel combinations of known visual and textual components - is critical for facilitating coherent reasoning and understanding across modalities by VLMs. To address this issue, we propose FINECAPTION, a novel VLM that can recognize arbitrary masks as referential inputs and process high-resolution images for compositional image captioning at different granularity levels. To support this endeavor, we introduce COMPOSITIONCAP, a new dataset for multi-grained region compositional image captioning, which introduces the task of compositional attribute-aware regional image captioning. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model compared to other state-of-the-art VLMs. Additionally, we analyze the capabilities of current VLMs in recognizing various visual prompts for compositional region image captioning, highlighting areas for improvement in VLM design and training.
Unmasking Anomalies in Road-Scene Segmentation
Anomaly segmentation is a critical task for driving applications, and it is approached traditionally as a per-pixel classification problem. However, reasoning individually about each pixel without considering their contextual semantics results in high uncertainty around the objects' boundaries and numerous false positives. We propose a paradigm change by shifting from a per-pixel classification to a mask classification. Our mask-based method, Mask2Anomaly, demonstrates the feasibility of integrating an anomaly detection method in a mask-classification architecture. Mask2Anomaly includes several technical novelties that are designed to improve the detection of anomalies in masks: i) a global masked attention module to focus individually on the foreground and background regions; ii) a mask contrastive learning that maximizes the margin between an anomaly and known classes; and iii) a mask refinement solution to reduce false positives. Mask2Anomaly achieves new state-of-the-art results across a range of benchmarks, both in the per-pixel and component-level evaluations. In particular, Mask2Anomaly reduces the average false positives rate by 60% wrt the previous state-of-the-art. Github page: https://github.com/shyam671/Mask2Anomaly-Unmasking-Anomalies-in-Road-Scene-Segmentation.
Novel View Extrapolation with Video Diffusion Priors
The field of novel view synthesis has made significant strides thanks to the development of radiance field methods. However, most radiance field techniques are far better at novel view interpolation than novel view extrapolation where the synthesis novel views are far beyond the observed training views. We design ViewExtrapolator, a novel view synthesis approach that leverages the generative priors of Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) for realistic novel view extrapolation. By redesigning the SVD denoising process, ViewExtrapolator refines the artifact-prone views rendered by radiance fields, greatly enhancing the clarity and realism of the synthesized novel views. ViewExtrapolator is a generic novel view extrapolator that can work with different types of 3D rendering such as views rendered from point clouds when only a single view or monocular video is available. Additionally, ViewExtrapolator requires no fine-tuning of SVD, making it both data-efficient and computation-efficient. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of ViewExtrapolator in novel view extrapolation. Project page: https://kunhao-liu.github.io/ViewExtrapolator/.
Metropolis Theorem and Its Applications in Single Image Detail Enhancement
Traditional image detail enhancement is local filter-based or global filter-based. In both approaches, the original image is first divided into the base layer and the detail layer, and then the enhanced image is obtained by amplifying the detail layer. Our method is different, and its innovation lies in the special way to get the image detail layer. The detail layer in our method is obtained by updating the residual features, and the updating mechanism is usually based on searching and matching similar patches. However, due to the diversity of image texture features, perfect matching is often not possible. In this paper, the process of searching and matching is treated as a thermodynamic process, where the Metropolis theorem can minimize the internal energy and get the global optimal solution of this task, that is, to find a more suitable feature for a better detail enhancement performance. Extensive experiments have proven that our algorithm can achieve better results in quantitative metrics testing and visual effects evaluation. The source code can be obtained from the link.
Iterative Prompt Learning for Unsupervised Backlit Image Enhancement
We propose a novel unsupervised backlit image enhancement method, abbreviated as CLIP-LIT, by exploring the potential of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) for pixel-level image enhancement. We show that the open-world CLIP prior not only aids in distinguishing between backlit and well-lit images, but also in perceiving heterogeneous regions with different luminance, facilitating the optimization of the enhancement network. Unlike high-level and image manipulation tasks, directly applying CLIP to enhancement tasks is non-trivial, owing to the difficulty in finding accurate prompts. To solve this issue, we devise a prompt learning framework that first learns an initial prompt pair by constraining the text-image similarity between the prompt (negative/positive sample) and the corresponding image (backlit image/well-lit image) in the CLIP latent space. Then, we train the enhancement network based on the text-image similarity between the enhanced result and the initial prompt pair. To further improve the accuracy of the initial prompt pair, we iteratively fine-tune the prompt learning framework to reduce the distribution gaps between the backlit images, enhanced results, and well-lit images via rank learning, boosting the enhancement performance. Our method alternates between updating the prompt learning framework and enhancement network until visually pleasing results are achieved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and generalization ability, without requiring any paired data.
Guidance and Evaluation: Semantic-Aware Image Inpainting for Mixed Scenes
Completing a corrupted image with correct structures and reasonable textures for a mixed scene remains an elusive challenge. Since the missing hole in a mixed scene of a corrupted image often contains various semantic information, conventional two-stage approaches utilizing structural information often lead to the problem of unreliable structural prediction and ambiguous image texture generation. In this paper, we propose a Semantic Guidance and Evaluation Network (SGE-Net) to iteratively update the structural priors and the inpainted image in an interplay framework of semantics extraction and image inpainting. It utilizes semantic segmentation map as guidance in each scale of inpainting, under which location-dependent inferences are re-evaluated, and, accordingly, poorly-inferred regions are refined in subsequent scales. Extensive experiments on real-world images of mixed scenes demonstrated the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art approaches, in terms of clear boundaries and photo-realistic textures.
3D Common Corruptions and Data Augmentation
We introduce a set of image transformations that can be used as corruptions to evaluate the robustness of models as well as data augmentation mechanisms for training neural networks. The primary distinction of the proposed transformations is that, unlike existing approaches such as Common Corruptions, the geometry of the scene is incorporated in the transformations -- thus leading to corruptions that are more likely to occur in the real world. We also introduce a set of semantic corruptions (e.g. natural object occlusions). We show these transformations are `efficient' (can be computed on-the-fly), `extendable' (can be applied on most image datasets), expose vulnerability of existing models, and can effectively make models more robust when employed as `3D data augmentation' mechanisms. The evaluations on several tasks and datasets suggest incorporating 3D information into benchmarking and training opens up a promising direction for robustness research.
Image generation with shortest path diffusion
The field of image generation has made significant progress thanks to the introduction of Diffusion Models, which learn to progressively reverse a given image corruption. Recently, a few studies introduced alternative ways of corrupting images in Diffusion Models, with an emphasis on blurring. However, these studies are purely empirical and it remains unclear what is the optimal procedure for corrupting an image. In this work, we hypothesize that the optimal procedure minimizes the length of the path taken when corrupting an image towards a given final state. We propose the Fisher metric for the path length, measured in the space of probability distributions. We compute the shortest path according to this metric, and we show that it corresponds to a combination of image sharpening, rather than blurring, and noise deblurring. While the corruption was chosen arbitrarily in previous work, our Shortest Path Diffusion (SPD) determines uniquely the entire spatiotemporal structure of the corruption. We show that SPD improves on strong baselines without any hyperparameter tuning, and outperforms all previous Diffusion Models based on image blurring. Furthermore, any small deviation from the shortest path leads to worse performance, suggesting that SPD provides the optimal procedure to corrupt images. Our work sheds new light on observations made in recent works and provides a new approach to improve diffusion models on images and other types of data.
CC-SAM: SAM with Cross-feature Attention and Context for Ultrasound Image Segmentation
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has achieved remarkable successes in the realm of natural image segmentation, but its deployment in the medical imaging sphere has encountered challenges. Specifically, the model struggles with medical images that feature low contrast, faint boundaries, intricate morphologies, and small-sized objects. To address these challenges and enhance SAM's performance in the medical domain, we introduce a comprehensive modification. Firstly, we incorporate a frozen Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) branch as an image encoder, which synergizes with SAM's original Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder through a novel variational attention fusion module. This integration bolsters the model's capability to capture local spatial information, which is often paramount in medical imagery. Moreover, to further optimize SAM for medical imaging, we introduce feature and position adapters within the ViT branch, refining the encoder's representations. We see that compared to current prompting strategies to fine-tune SAM for ultrasound medical segmentation, the use of text descriptions that serve as text prompts for SAM helps significantly improve the performance. Leveraging ChatGPT's natural language understanding capabilities, we generate prompts that offer contextual information and guidance to SAM, enabling it to better understand the nuances of ultrasound medical images and improve its segmentation accuracy. Our method, in its entirety, represents a significant stride towards making universal image segmentation models more adaptable and efficient in the medical domain.
Several questions of visual generation in 2024
This paper does not propose any new algorithms but instead outlines various problems in the field of visual generation based on the author's personal understanding. The core of these problems lies in how to decompose visual signals, with all other issues being closely related to this central problem and stemming from unsuitable approaches to signal decomposition. This paper aims to draw researchers' attention to the significance of Visual Signal Decomposition.
Continuous-Multiple Image Outpainting in One-Step via Positional Query and A Diffusion-based Approach
Image outpainting aims to generate the content of an input sub-image beyond its original boundaries. It is an important task in content generation yet remains an open problem for generative models. This paper pushes the technical frontier of image outpainting in two directions that have not been resolved in literature: 1) outpainting with arbitrary and continuous multiples (without restriction), and 2) outpainting in a single step (even for large expansion multiples). Moreover, we develop a method that does not depend on a pre-trained backbone network, which is in contrast commonly required by the previous SOTA outpainting methods. The arbitrary multiple outpainting is achieved by utilizing randomly cropped views from the same image during training to capture arbitrary relative positional information. Specifically, by feeding one view and positional embeddings as queries, we can reconstruct another view. At inference, we generate images with arbitrary expansion multiples by inputting an anchor image and its corresponding positional embeddings. The one-step outpainting ability here is particularly noteworthy in contrast to previous methods that need to be performed for N times to obtain a final multiple which is N times of its basic and fixed multiple. We evaluate the proposed approach (called PQDiff as we adopt a diffusion-based generator as our embodiment, under our proposed Positional Query scheme) on public benchmarks, demonstrating its superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches. Specifically, PQDiff achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on the Scenery (21.512), Building Facades (25.310), and WikiArts (36.212) datasets. Furthermore, under the 2.25x, 5x and 11.7x outpainting settings, PQDiff only takes 40.6\%, 20.3\% and 10.2\% of the time of the benchmark state-of-the-art (SOTA) method.
High-Perceptual Quality JPEG Decoding via Posterior Sampling
JPEG is arguably the most popular image coding format, achieving high compression ratios via lossy quantization that may create visual artifacts degradation. Numerous attempts to remove these artifacts were conceived over the years, and common to most of these is the use of deterministic post-processing algorithms that optimize some distortion measure (e.g., PSNR, SSIM). In this paper we propose a different paradigm for JPEG artifact correction: Our method is stochastic, and the objective we target is high perceptual quality -- striving to obtain sharp, detailed and visually pleasing reconstructed images, while being consistent with the compressed input. These goals are achieved by training a stochastic conditional generator (conditioned on the compressed input), accompanied by a theoretically well-founded loss term, resulting in a sampler from the posterior distribution. Our solution offers a diverse set of plausible and fast reconstructions for a given input with perfect consistency. We demonstrate our scheme's unique properties and its superiority to a variety of alternative methods on the FFHQ and ImageNet datasets.
MulModSeg: Enhancing Unpaired Multi-Modal Medical Image Segmentation with Modality-Conditioned Text Embedding and Alternating Training
In the diverse field of medical imaging, automatic segmentation has numerous applications and must handle a wide variety of input domains, such as different types of Computed Tomography (CT) scans and Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. This heterogeneity challenges automatic segmentation algorithms to maintain consistent performance across different modalities due to the requirement for spatially aligned and paired images. Typically, segmentation models are trained using a single modality, which limits their ability to generalize to other types of input data without employing transfer learning techniques. Additionally, leveraging complementary information from different modalities to enhance segmentation precision often necessitates substantial modifications to popular encoder-decoder designs, such as introducing multiple branched encoding or decoding paths for each modality. In this work, we propose a simple Multi-Modal Segmentation (MulModSeg) strategy to enhance medical image segmentation across multiple modalities, specifically CT and MR. It incorporates two key designs: a modality-conditioned text embedding framework via a frozen text encoder that adds modality awareness to existing segmentation frameworks without significant structural modifications or computational overhead, and an alternating training procedure that facilitates the integration of essential features from unpaired CT and MR inputs. Through extensive experiments with both Fully Convolutional Network and Transformer-based backbones, MulModSeg consistently outperforms previous methods in segmenting abdominal multi-organ and cardiac substructures for both CT and MR modalities. The code is available in this {https://github.com/ChengyinLee/MulModSeg_2024{link}}.
Multi-modal Evidential Fusion Network for Trusted PET/CT Tumor Segmentation
Accurate segmentation of tumors in PET/CT images is important in computer-aided diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The key issue of such a segmentation problem lies in the effective integration of complementary information from PET and CT images. However, the quality of PET and CT images varies widely in clinical settings, which leads to uncertainty in the modality information extracted by networks. To take the uncertainty into account in multi-modal information fusion, this paper proposes a novel Multi-modal Evidential Fusion Network (MEFN) comprising a Cross-Modal Feature Learning (CFL) module and a Multi-modal Trusted Fusion (MTF) module. The CFL module reduces the domain gap upon modality conversion and highlights common tumor features, thereby alleviating the needs of the segmentation module to handle modality specificity. The MTF module utilizes mutual attention mechanisms and an uncertainty calibrator to fuse modality features based on modality uncertainty and then fuse the segmentation results under the guidance of Dempster-Shafer Theory. Besides, a new uncertainty perceptual loss is introduced to force the model focusing on uncertain features and hence improve its ability to extract trusted modality information. Extensive comparative experiments are conducted on two publicly available PET/CT datasets to evaluate the performance of our proposed method whose results demonstrate that our MEFN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with improvements of 2.15% and 3.23% in DSC scores on the AutoPET dataset and the Hecktor dataset, respectively. More importantly, our model can provide radiologists with credible uncertainty of the segmentation results for their decision in accepting or rejecting the automatic segmentation results, which is particularly important for clinical applications. Our code will be available at https://github.com/QPaws/MEFN.
Patch-wise Contrastive Style Learning for Instagram Filter Removal
Image-level corruptions and perturbations degrade the performance of CNNs on different downstream vision tasks. Social media filters are one of the most common resources of various corruptions and perturbations for real-world visual analysis applications. The negative effects of these distractive factors can be alleviated by recovering the original images with their pure style for the inference of the downstream vision tasks. Assuming these filters substantially inject a piece of additional style information to the social media images, we can formulate the problem of recovering the original versions as a reverse style transfer problem. We introduce Contrastive Instagram Filter Removal Network (CIFR), which enhances this idea for Instagram filter removal by employing a novel multi-layer patch-wise contrastive style learning mechanism. Experiments show our proposed strategy produces better qualitative and quantitative results than the previous studies. Moreover, we present the results of our additional experiments for proposed architecture within different settings. Finally, we present the inference outputs and quantitative comparison of filtered and recovered images on localization and segmentation tasks to encourage the main motivation for this problem.
Image Inpainting with External-internal Learning and Monochromic Bottleneck
Although recent inpainting approaches have demonstrated significant improvements with deep neural networks, they still suffer from artifacts such as blunt structures and abrupt colors when filling in the missing regions. To address these issues, we propose an external-internal inpainting scheme with a monochromic bottleneck that helps image inpainting models remove these artifacts. In the external learning stage, we reconstruct missing structures and details in the monochromic space to reduce the learning dimension. In the internal learning stage, we propose a novel internal color propagation method with progressive learning strategies for consistent color restoration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed scheme helps image inpainting models produce more structure-preserved and visually compelling results.
Unsupervised Night Image Enhancement: When Layer Decomposition Meets Light-Effects Suppression
Night images suffer not only from low light, but also from uneven distributions of light. Most existing night visibility enhancement methods focus mainly on enhancing low-light regions. This inevitably leads to over enhancement and saturation in bright regions, such as those regions affected by light effects (glare, floodlight, etc). To address this problem, we need to suppress the light effects in bright regions while, at the same time, boosting the intensity of dark regions. With this idea in mind, we introduce an unsupervised method that integrates a layer decomposition network and a light-effects suppression network. Given a single night image as input, our decomposition network learns to decompose shading, reflectance and light-effects layers, guided by unsupervised layer-specific prior losses. Our light-effects suppression network further suppresses the light effects and, at the same time, enhances the illumination in dark regions. This light-effects suppression network exploits the estimated light-effects layer as the guidance to focus on the light-effects regions. To recover the background details and reduce hallucination/artefacts, we propose structure and high-frequency consistency losses. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations on real images show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in suppressing night light effects and boosting the intensity of dark regions.
Dehazing Ultrasound using Diffusion Models
Echocardiography has been a prominent tool for the diagnosis of cardiac disease. However, these diagnoses can be heavily impeded by poor image quality. Acoustic clutter emerges due to multipath reflections imposed by layers of skin, subcutaneous fat, and intercostal muscle between the transducer and heart. As a result, haze and other noise artifacts pose a real challenge to cardiac ultrasound imaging. In many cases, especially with difficult-to-image patients such as patients with obesity, a diagnosis from B-Mode ultrasound imaging is effectively rendered unusable, forcing sonographers to resort to contrast-enhanced ultrasound examinations or refer patients to other imaging modalities. Tissue harmonic imaging has been a popular approach to combat haze, but in severe cases is still heavily impacted by haze. Alternatively, denoising algorithms are typically unable to remove highly structured and correlated noise, such as haze. It remains a challenge to accurately describe the statistical properties of structured haze, and develop an inference method to subsequently remove it. Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative models and have shown their effectiveness in a variety of inverse problems. In this work, we present a joint posterior sampling framework that combines two separate diffusion models to model the distribution of both clean ultrasound and haze in an unsupervised manner. Furthermore, we demonstrate techniques for effectively training diffusion models on radio-frequency ultrasound data and highlight the advantages over image data. Experiments on both in-vitro and in-vivo cardiac datasets show that the proposed dehazing method effectively removes haze while preserving signals from weakly reflected tissue.
Good Seed Makes a Good Crop: Discovering Secret Seeds in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have facilitated creative and photorealistic image synthesis. By varying the random seeds, we can generate various images for a fixed text prompt. Technically, the seed controls the initial noise and, in multi-step diffusion inference, the noise used for reparameterization at intermediate timesteps in the reverse diffusion process. However, the specific impact of the random seed on the generated images remains relatively unexplored. In this work, we conduct a large-scale scientific study into the impact of random seeds during diffusion inference. Remarkably, we reveal that the best 'golden' seed achieved an impressive FID of 21.60, compared to the worst 'inferior' seed's FID of 31.97. Additionally, a classifier can predict the seed number used to generate an image with over 99.9% accuracy in just a few epochs, establishing that seeds are highly distinguishable based on generated images. Encouraged by these findings, we examined the influence of seeds on interpretable visual dimensions. We find that certain seeds consistently produce grayscale images, prominent sky regions, or image borders. Seeds also affect image composition, including object location, size, and depth. Moreover, by leveraging these 'golden' seeds, we demonstrate improved image generation such as high-fidelity inference and diversified sampling. Our investigation extends to inpainting tasks, where we uncover some seeds that tend to insert unwanted text artifacts. Overall, our extensive analyses highlight the importance of selecting good seeds and offer practical utility for image generation.
Learning Nuclei Representations with Masked Image Modelling
Masked image modelling (MIM) is a powerful self-supervised representation learning paradigm, whose potential has not been widely demonstrated in medical image analysis. In this work, we show the capacity of MIM to capture rich semantic representations of Haemotoxylin & Eosin (H&E)-stained images at the nuclear level. Inspired by Bidirectional Encoder representation from Image Transformers (BEiT), we split the images into smaller patches and generate corresponding discrete visual tokens. In addition to the regular grid-based patches, typically used in visual Transformers, we introduce patches of individual cell nuclei. We propose positional encoding of the irregular distribution of these structures within an image. We pre-train the model in a self-supervised manner on H&E-stained whole-slide images of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, where cell nuclei have been segmented. The pre-training objective is to recover the original discrete visual tokens of the masked image on the one hand, and to reconstruct the visual tokens of the masked object instances on the other. Coupling these two pre-training tasks allows us to build powerful, context-aware representations of nuclei. Our model generalizes well and can be fine-tuned on downstream classification tasks, achieving improved cell classification accuracy on PanNuke dataset by more than 5% compared to current instance segmentation methods.
ART: Anonymous Region Transformer for Variable Multi-Layer Transparent Image Generation
Multi-layer image generation is a fundamental task that enables users to isolate, select, and edit specific image layers, thereby revolutionizing interactions with generative models. In this paper, we introduce the Anonymous Region Transformer (ART), which facilitates the direct generation of variable multi-layer transparent images based on a global text prompt and an anonymous region layout. Inspired by Schema theory suggests that knowledge is organized in frameworks (schemas) that enable people to interpret and learn from new information by linking it to prior knowledge.}, this anonymous region layout allows the generative model to autonomously determine which set of visual tokens should align with which text tokens, which is in contrast to the previously dominant semantic layout for the image generation task. In addition, the layer-wise region crop mechanism, which only selects the visual tokens belonging to each anonymous region, significantly reduces attention computation costs and enables the efficient generation of images with numerous distinct layers (e.g., 50+). When compared to the full attention approach, our method is over 12 times faster and exhibits fewer layer conflicts. Furthermore, we propose a high-quality multi-layer transparent image autoencoder that supports the direct encoding and decoding of the transparency of variable multi-layer images in a joint manner. By enabling precise control and scalable layer generation, ART establishes a new paradigm for interactive content creation.
Less is More: Fewer Interpretable Region via Submodular Subset Selection
Image attribution algorithms aim to identify important regions that are highly relevant to model decisions. Although existing attribution solutions can effectively assign importance to target elements, they still face the following challenges: 1) existing attribution methods generate inaccurate small regions thus misleading the direction of correct attribution, and 2) the model cannot produce good attribution results for samples with wrong predictions. To address the above challenges, this paper re-models the above image attribution problem as a submodular subset selection problem, aiming to enhance model interpretability using fewer regions. To address the lack of attention to local regions, we construct a novel submodular function to discover more accurate small interpretation regions. To enhance the attribution effect for all samples, we also impose four different constraints on the selection of sub-regions, i.e., confidence, effectiveness, consistency, and collaboration scores, to assess the importance of various subsets. Moreover, our theoretical analysis substantiates that the proposed function is in fact submodular. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms SOTA methods on two face datasets (Celeb-A and VGG-Face2) and one fine-grained dataset (CUB-200-2011). For correctly predicted samples, the proposed method improves the Deletion and Insertion scores with an average of 4.9% and 2.5% gain relative to HSIC-Attribution. For incorrectly predicted samples, our method achieves gains of 81.0% and 18.4% compared to the HSIC-Attribution algorithm in the average highest confidence and Insertion score respectively. The code is released at https://github.com/RuoyuChen10/SMDL-Attribution.
Segmentation of Non-Small Cell Lung Carcinomas: Introducing DRU-Net and Multi-Lens Distortion
Considering the increased workload in pathology laboratories today, automated tools such as artificial intelligence models can help pathologists with their tasks and ease the workload. In this paper, we are proposing a segmentation model (DRU-Net) that can provide a delineation of human non-small cell lung carcinomas and an augmentation method that can improve classification results. The proposed model is a fused combination of truncated pre-trained DenseNet201 and ResNet101V2 as a patch-wise classifier followed by a lightweight U-Net as a refinement model. We have used two datasets (Norwegian Lung Cancer Biobank and Haukeland University Hospital lung cancer cohort) to create our proposed model. The DRU-Net model achieves an average of 0.91 Dice similarity coefficient. The proposed spatial augmentation method (multi-lens distortion) improved the network performance by 3%. Our findings show that choosing image patches that specifically include regions of interest leads to better results for the patch-wise classifier compared to other sampling methods. The qualitative analysis showed that the DRU-Net model is generally successful in detecting the tumor. On the test set, some of the cases showed areas of false positive and false negative segmentation in the periphery, particularly in tumors with inflammatory and reactive changes.
LIME: Localized Image Editing via Attention Regularization in Diffusion Models
Diffusion models (DMs) have gained prominence due to their ability to generate high-quality, varied images, with recent advancements in text-to-image generation. The research focus is now shifting towards the controllability of DMs. A significant challenge within this domain is localized editing, where specific areas of an image are modified without affecting the rest of the content. This paper introduces LIME for localized image editing in diffusion models that do not require user-specified regions of interest (RoI) or additional text input. Our method employs features from pre-trained methods and a simple clustering technique to obtain precise semantic segmentation maps. Then, by leveraging cross-attention maps, it refines these segments for localized edits. Finally, we propose a novel cross-attention regularization technique that penalizes unrelated cross-attention scores in the RoI during the denoising steps, ensuring localized edits. Our approach, without re-training and fine-tuning, consistently improves the performance of existing methods in various editing benchmarks.
The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization
We introduce four new real-world distribution shift datasets consisting of changes in image style, image blurriness, geographic location, camera operation, and more. With our new datasets, we take stock of previously proposed methods for improving out-of-distribution robustness and put them to the test. We find that using larger models and artificial data augmentations can improve robustness on real-world distribution shifts, contrary to claims in prior work. We find improvements in artificial robustness benchmarks can transfer to real-world distribution shifts, contrary to claims in prior work. Motivated by our observation that data augmentations can help with real-world distribution shifts, we also introduce a new data augmentation method which advances the state-of-the-art and outperforms models pretrained with 1000 times more labeled data. Overall we find that some methods consistently help with distribution shifts in texture and local image statistics, but these methods do not help with some other distribution shifts like geographic changes. Our results show that future research must study multiple distribution shifts simultaneously, as we demonstrate that no evaluated method consistently improves robustness.
Localizing Object-level Shape Variations with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Text-to-image models give rise to workflows which often begin with an exploration step, where users sift through a large collection of generated images. The global nature of the text-to-image generation process prevents users from narrowing their exploration to a particular object in the image. In this paper, we present a technique to generate a collection of images that depicts variations in the shape of a specific object, enabling an object-level shape exploration process. Creating plausible variations is challenging as it requires control over the shape of the generated object while respecting its semantics. A particular challenge when generating object variations is accurately localizing the manipulation applied over the object's shape. We introduce a prompt-mixing technique that switches between prompts along the denoising process to attain a variety of shape choices. To localize the image-space operation, we present two techniques that use the self-attention layers in conjunction with the cross-attention layers. Moreover, we show that these localization techniques are general and effective beyond the scope of generating object variations. Extensive results and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating object variations, and the competence of our localization techniques.
Deshadow-Anything: When Segment Anything Model Meets Zero-shot shadow removal
Segment Anything (SAM), an advanced universal image segmentation model trained on an expansive visual dataset, has set a new benchmark in image segmentation and computer vision. However, it faced challenges when it came to distinguishing between shadows and their backgrounds. To address this, we developed Deshadow-Anything, considering the generalization of large-scale datasets, and we performed Fine-tuning on large-scale datasets to achieve image shadow removal. The diffusion model can diffuse along the edges and textures of an image, helping to remove shadows while preserving the details of the image. Furthermore, we design Multi-Self-Attention Guidance (MSAG) and adaptive input perturbation (DDPM-AIP) to accelerate the iterative training speed of diffusion. Experiments on shadow removal tasks demonstrate that these methods can effectively improve image restoration performance.
FiLo: Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection by Fine-Grained Description and High-Quality Localization
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) methods entail detecting anomalies directly without access to any known normal or abnormal samples within the target item categories. Existing approaches typically rely on the robust generalization capabilities of multimodal pretrained models, computing similarities between manually crafted textual features representing "normal" or "abnormal" semantics and image features to detect anomalies and localize anomalous patches. However, the generic descriptions of "abnormal" often fail to precisely match diverse types of anomalies across different object categories. Additionally, computing feature similarities for single patches struggles to pinpoint specific locations of anomalies with various sizes and scales. To address these issues, we propose a novel ZSAD method called FiLo, comprising two components: adaptively learned Fine-Grained Description (FG-Des) and position-enhanced High-Quality Localization (HQ-Loc). FG-Des introduces fine-grained anomaly descriptions for each category using Large Language Models (LLMs) and employs adaptively learned textual templates to enhance the accuracy and interpretability of anomaly detection. HQ-Loc, utilizing Grounding DINO for preliminary localization, position-enhanced text prompts, and Multi-scale Multi-shape Cross-modal Interaction (MMCI) module, facilitates more accurate localization of anomalies of different sizes and shapes. Experimental results on datasets like MVTec and VisA demonstrate that FiLo significantly improves the performance of ZSAD in both detection and localization, achieving state-of-the-art performance with an image-level AUC of 83.9% and a pixel-level AUC of 95.9% on the VisA dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/FiLo.