In this paper, we propose a robust 3D detector, named Cross Modal Transformer (CMT), for end-to-end 3D multi-modal detection. Without explicit view transformation, CMT takes the image and point clouds tokens as inputs and directly outputs accurate 3D bounding boxes. The spatial alignment of multi-modal tokens is performed implicitly, by encoding the 3D points into multi-modal features. The core design of CMT is quite simple while its performance is impressive. CMT obtains 73.0% NDS on nuScenes benchmark. Moreover, CMT has a strong robustness even if the LiDAR is missing. Code will be released at https://github.com/junjie18/CMT.

The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are revolutionizing how people move, sense, and interact with cities. This paper reviews the literature on the appearance and function of cities to illustrate how visual information has been used to understand them. A conceptual framework, Urban Visual Intelligence, is introduced to systematically elaborate on how new image data sources and AI techniques are reshaping the way researchers perceive and measure cities, enabling the study of the physical environment and its interactions with socioeconomic environments at various scales. The paper argues that these new approaches enable researchers to revisit the classic urban theories and themes, and potentially help cities create environments that are more in line with human behaviors and aspirations in the digital age.

Improving the visual quality of the given degraded observation by correcting exposure level is a fundamental task in the computer vision community. Existing works commonly lack adaptability towards unknown scenes because of the data-driven patterns (deep networks) and limited regularization (traditional optimization), and they usually need time-consuming inference. These two points heavily limit their practicability. In this paper, we establish a Practical Exposure Corrector (PEC) that assembles the characteristics of efficiency and performance. To be concrete, we rethink the exposure correction to provide a linear solution with exposure-sensitive compensation. Around generating the compensation, we introduce an exposure adversarial function as the key engine to fully extract valuable information from the observation. By applying the defined function, we construct a segmented shrinkage iterative scheme to generate the desired compensation. Its shrinkage nature supplies powerful support for algorithmic stability and robustness. Extensive experimental evaluations fully reveal the superiority of our proposed PEC. The code is available at https://rsliu.tech/PEC.

Diagram object detection is the key basis of practical applications such as textbook question answering. Because the diagram mainly consists of simple lines and color blocks, its visual features are sparser than those of natural images. In addition, diagrams usually express diverse knowledge, in which there are many low-frequency object categories in diagrams. These lead to the fact that traditional data-driven detection model is not suitable for diagrams. In this work, we propose a gestalt-perception transformer model for diagram object detection, which is based on an encoder-decoder architecture. Gestalt perception contains a series of laws to explain human perception, that the human visual system tends to perceive patches in an image that are similar, close or connected without abrupt directional changes as a perceptual whole object. Inspired by these thoughts, we build a gestalt-perception graph in transformer encoder, which is composed of diagram patches as nodes and the relationships between patches as edges. This graph aims to group these patches into objects via laws of similarity, proximity, and smoothness implied in these edges, so that the meaningful objects can be effectively detected. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GPTR achieves the best results in the diagram object detection task. Our model also obtains comparable results over the competitors in natural image object detection.

Recently, over-height vehicle strike frequently occurs, causing great economic cost and serious safety problems. Hence, an alert system which can accurately discover any possible height limiting devices in advance is necessary to be employed in modern large or medium sized cars, such as touring cars. Detecting and estimating the height limiting devices act as the key point of a successful height limit alert system. Though there are some works research height limit estimation, existing methods are either too computational expensive or not accurate enough. In this paper, we propose a novel stereo-based pipeline named SHLE for height limit estimation. Our SHLE pipeline consists of two stages. In stage 1, a novel devices detection and tracking scheme is introduced, which accurately locate the height limit devices in the left or right image. Then, in stage 2, the depth is temporally measured, extracted and filtered to calculate the height limit device. To benchmark the height limit estimation task, we build a large-scale dataset named "Disparity Height", where stereo images, pre-computed disparities and ground-truth height limit annotations are provided. We conducted extensive experiments on "Disparity Height" and the results show that SHLE achieves an average error below than 10cm though the car is 70m away from the devices. Our method also outperforms all compared baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Yang-Kaixing/SHLE.

The booming development and huge market of micro-videos bring new e-commerce channels for merchants. Currently, more micro-video publishers prefer to embed relevant ads into their micro-videos, which not only provides them with business income but helps the audiences to discover their interesting products. However, due to the micro-video recording by unprofessional equipment, involving various topics and including multiple modalities, it is challenging to locate the products related to micro-videos efficiently, appropriately, and accurately. We formulate the microvideo-product retrieval task, which is the first attempt to explore the retrieval between the multi-modal and multi-modal instances. A novel approach named Multi-Queue Momentum Contrast (MQMC) network is proposed for bidirectional retrieval, consisting of the uni-modal feature and multi-modal instance representation learning. Moreover, a discriminative selection strategy with a multi-queue is used to distinguish the importance of different negatives based on their categories. We collect two large-scale microvideo-product datasets (MVS and MVS-large) for evaluation and manually construct the hierarchical category ontology, which covers sundry products in daily life. Extensive experiments show that MQMC outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Our replication package (including code, dataset, etc.) is publicly available at https://github.com/duyali2000/MQMC.

Machine learning model development and optimisation can be a rather cumbersome and resource-intensive process. Custom models are often more difficult to build and deploy, and they require infrastructure and expertise which are often costly to acquire and maintain. Machine learning product development lifecycle must take into account the need to navigate the difficulties of developing and deploying machine learning models. evoML is an AI-powered tool that provides automated functionalities in machine learning model development, optimisation, and model code optimisation. Core functionalities of evoML include data cleaning, exploratory analysis, feature analysis and generation, model optimisation, model evaluation, model code optimisation, and model deployment. Additionally, a key feature of evoML is that it embeds code and model optimisation into the model development process, and includes multi-objective optimisation capabilities.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

In the realm of multi-modality, text-guided image retouching techniques emerged with the advent of deep learning. Most currently available text-guided methods, however, rely on object-level supervision to constrain the region that may be modified. This not only makes it more challenging to develop these algorithms, but it also limits how widely deep learning can be used for image retouching. In this paper, we offer a text-guided mask-free image retouching approach that yields consistent results to address this concern. In order to perform image retouching without mask supervision, our technique can construct plausible and edge-sharp masks based on the text for each object in the image. Extensive experiments have shown that our method can produce high-quality, accurate images based on spoken language. The source code will be released soon.

How to effectively leverage the plentiful existing datasets to train a robust and high-performance model is of great significance for many practical applications. However, a model trained on a naive merge of different datasets tends to obtain poor performance due to annotation conflicts and domain divergence.In this paper, we attempt to train a unified model that is expected to perform well across domains on several popularity segmentation datasets.We conduct a detailed analysis of the impact on model generalization from three aspects of data augmentation, training strategies, and model capacity.Based on the analysis, we propose a robust solution that is able to improve model generalization across domains.Our solution ranks 2nd on RVC 2022 semantic segmentation task, with a dataset only 1/3 size of the 1st model used.