The Balanced-Pairwise-Affinities (BPA) feature transform is designed to upgrade the features of a set of input items to facilitate downstream matching or grouping related tasks. The transformed set encodes a rich representation of high order relations between the input features. A particular min-cost-max-flow fractional matching problem, whose entropy regularized version can be approximated by an optimal transport (OT) optimization, leads to a transform which is efficient, differentiable, equivariant, parameterless and probabilistically interpretable. While the Sinkhorn OT solver has been adapted extensively in many contexts, we use it differently by minimizing the cost between a set of features to itself and using the transport plan’s rows as the new representation.Empirically, the transform is highly effective and flexible in its use and consistently improves networks it is inserted into, in a variety of tasks and training schemes. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results in few-shot classification, unsupervised image clustering and person re-identification. Code is available at github.com/DanielShalam/BPA .

Research on neural radiance fields (NeRFs) for novel view generation is exploding with new models and extensions. However, a question that remains unanswered is what happens in underwater or foggy scenes where the medium strongly influences the appearance of objects. Thus far, NeRF and its variants have ignored these cases. However, since the NeRF framework is based on volumetric rendering, it has inherent capability to account for the medium's effects, once modeled appropriately. We develop a new rendering model for NeRFs in scattering media, which is based on the SeaThru image formation model, and suggest a suitable architecture for learning both scene information and medium parameters. We demonstrate the strength of our method using simulated and real-world scenes, correctly rendering novel photorealistic views underwater. Even more excitingly, we can render clear views of these scenes, removing the medium between the camera and the scene and reconstructing the appearance and depth of far objects, which are severely occluded by the medium. Our code and unique datasets are available on the project's website.

Burst denoising is now more relevant than ever, as computational photography helps overcome sensitivity issues inherent in mobile phones and small cameras. A major challenge in burst-denoising is in coping with pixel misalignment, which was so far handled with rather simplistic assumptions of simple motion, or the ability to align in pre-processing. Such assumptions are not realistic in the presence of large motion and high levels of noise. We show that Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), originally suggested for physics-based novel-view rendering, can serve as a powerful framework for burst denoising. NeRFs have an inherent capability of handling noise as they integrate information from multiple images, but they are limited in doing so, mainly since they build on pixel-wise operations which are suitable to ideal imaging conditions. Our approach, termed NAN111Refer to the project website: noise-aware-nerf.github.io, leverages inter-view and spatial information in NeRFs to better deal with noise. It achieves state-of-the-art results in burst denoising and is especially successful in coping with large movement and occlusions, under very high levels of noise. With the rapid advances in accelerating NeRFs, it could provide a powerful platform for denoising in challenging environments.

We present a method that can evaluate a RANSAC hypothesis in constant time, i.e. independent of the size of the data. A key observation here is that correct hypotheses are tightly clustered together in the latent parameter domain. In a manner similar to the generalized Hough transform we seek to find this cluster, only that we need as few as two votes for a successful detection. Rapidly locating such pairs of similar hypotheses is made possible by adapting the recent "Random Grids" range-search technique. We only perform the usual (costly) hypothesis verification stage upon the discovery of a close pair of hypotheses. We show that this event rarely happens for incorrect hypotheses, enabling a significant speedup of the RANSAC pipeline. The suggested approach is applied and tested on three robust estimation problems: camera localization, 3D rigid alignment and 2D-homography estimation. We perform rigorous testing on both synthetic and real datasets, demonstrating an improvement in efficiency without a compromise in accuracy. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art 3D alignment results on the challenging "Redwood" loopclosure challenge.

We present a novel approach to template matching that is efficient, can handle partial occlusions, and comes with provable performance guarantees. A key component of the method is a reduction that transforms the problem of searching a nearest neighbor among N high-dimensional vectors, to searching neighbors among two sets of order √N vectors, which can be found efficiently using range search techniques. This allows for a quadratic improvement in search complexity, and makes the method scalable in handling large search spaces. The second contribution is a hashing scheme based on consensus set maximization, which allows us to handle occlusions. The resulting scheme can be seen as a randomized hypothesize-and-test algorithm, which is equipped with guarantees regarding the number of iterations required for obtaining an optimal solution with high probability. The predicted matching rates are validated empirically and the algorithm shows a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art in both speed and robustness to occlusions.

Analyzing multi-dimensional data is a fundamental problem in various areas of computer science. As the amount of data is often huge, it is desirable to obtain sublinear time algorithms to understand local properties of the data. We focus on the natural problem of testing pattern freeness: given a large d-dimensional array A and a fixed d-dimensional pattern P over a finite alphabet Gamma, we say that A is P-free if it does not contain a copy of the forbidden pattern P as a consecutive subarray. The distance of A to P-freeness is the fraction of the entries of A that need to be modified to make it P-free. For any epsilon > 0 and any large enough pattern P over any alphabet - other than a very small set of exceptional patterns - we design a tolerant tester that distinguishes between the case that the distance is at least epsilon and the case that the distance is at most a_d epsilon, with query complexity and running time c_d epsilon^{-1}, where a_d < 1 and c_d depend only on the dimension d. These testers only need to access uniformly random blocks of samples from the input A. To analyze the testers we establish several combinatorial results, including the following d-dimensional modification lemma, which might be of independent interest: For any large enough d-dimensional pattern P over any alphabet (excluding a small set of exceptional patterns for the binary case), and any d-dimensional array A containing a copy of P, one can delete this copy by modifying one of its locations without creating new P-copies in A. Our results address an open question of Fischer and Newman, who asked whether there exist efficient testers for properties related to tight substructures in multi-dimensional structured data.

Coherency Sensitive Hashing (CSH) extends Locality Sensitivity Hashing (LSH) and PatchMatch to quickly find matching patches between two images. LSH relies on hashing, which maps similar patches to the same bin, in order to find matching patches. PatchMatch, on the other hand, relies on the observation that images are coherent, to propagate good matches to their neighbors in the image plane, using random patch assignment to seed the initial matching. CSH relies on hashing to seed the initial patch matching and on image coherence to propagate good matches. In addition, hashing lets it propagate information between patches with similar appearance (i.e., map to the same bin). This way, information is propagated much faster because it can use similarity in appearance space or neighborhood in the image plane. As a result, CSH is at least three to four times faster than PatchMatch and more accurate, especially in textured regions, where reconstruction artifacts are most noticeable to the human eye. We verified CSH on a new, large scale, data set of 133 image pairs and experimented on several extensions, including: k nearest neighbor search, the addition of rotation and matching three dimensional patches in videos.

This work presents a novel approach for detecting inliers in a given set of correspondences (matches). It does so without explicitly identifying any consensus set, based on a method for inlier rate estimation (IRE). Given such an estimator for the inlier rate, we also present an algorithm that detects a globally optimal transformation. We provide a theoretical analysis of the IRE method using a stochastic generative model on the continuous spaces of matches and transformations. This model allows rigorous investigation of the limits of our IRE method for the case of 2D-translation, further giving bounds and insights for the more general case. Our theoretical analysis is validated empirically and is shown to hold in practice for the more general case of 2D-affinities. In addition, we show that the combined framework works on challenging cases of 2D-homography estimation, with very few and possibly noisy inliers, where RANSAC generally fails.

We propose a method that extends a given depth image into regions in 3D that are not visible from the point of view of the camera. The algorithm detects repeated 3D structures in the visible scene and suggests a set of 3D extension hypotheses, which are then combined together through a global 3D MRF discrete optimization. The recovered global 3D surface is consistent with both the input depth map and the hypotheses. A key component of this work is a novel 3D template matcher that is used to detect repeated 3D structure in the scene and to suggest the hypotheses. A unique property of this matcher is that it can handle depth uncertainty. This is crucial because the matcher is required to "peek around the corner", as it operates at the boundaries of the visible 3D scene where depth information is missing. The proposed matcher is fast and is guaranteed to find an approximation to the globally optimal solution. We demonstrate on real-world data that our algorithm is capable of completing a full 3D scene from a single depth image and can synthesize a full depth map from a novel viewpoint of the scene. In addition, we report results on an extensive synthetic set of 3D shapes, which allows us to evaluate the method both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Abstract We present a fast algorithm for global rigid symmetry detection with approximation guarantees. The algorithm is guaranteed to find the best approximate symmetry of a given shape, to within a user‐specified threshold, with very high probability. Our method uses a carefully designed sampling of the transformation space, where each transformation is efficiently evaluated using a sublinear algorithm. We prove that the density of the sampling depends on the total variation of the shape, allowing us to derive formal bounds on the algorithm's complexity and approximation quality. We further investigate different volumetric shape representations (in the form of truncated distance transforms), and in such a way control the total variation of the shape and hence the sampling density and the runtime of the algorithm. A comprehensive set of experiments assesses the proposed method, including an evaluation on the eight categories of the COSEG data set. This is the first large‐scale evaluation of any symmetry detection technique that we are aware of.

Fast-Match is a fast algorithm for approximate template matching under 2D affine transformations that minimizes the Sum-of-Absolute-Differences (SAD) error measure. There is a huge number of transformations to consider but we prove that they can be sampled using a density that depends on the smoothness of the image. For each potential transformation, we approximate the SAD error using a sub linear algorithm that randomly examines only a small number of pixels. We further accelerate the algorithm using a branch-and-bound scheme. As images are known to be piecewise smooth, the result is a practical affine template matching algorithm with approximation guarantees, that takes a few seconds to run on a standard machine. We perform several experiments on three different datasets, and report very good results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first template matching algorithm which is guaranteed to handle arbitrary 2D affine transformations.

We extend patch based methods to work on patches in 3D space. We start with Coherency Sensitive Hashing (CSH), which is an algorithm for matching patches between two RGB images, and extend it to work with RGBD images. This is done by warping all 3D patches to a common virtual plane in which CSH is performed. To avoid noise due to warping of patches of various normals and depths, we estimate a group of dominant planes and compute CSH on each plane separately, before merging the matching patches. The result is DCSH - an algorithm that matches world (3D) patches in order to guide the search for image plane matches. An independent contribution is an extension of CSH, which we term Social-CSH. It allows a major speedup of the k nearest neighbor (kNN) version of CSH - its runtime growing linearly, rather than quadratic ally, in k. Social-CSH is used as a subcomponent of DCSH when many NNs are required, as in the case of image denoising. We show the benefits of using depth information to image reconstruction and image denoising, demonstrated on several RGBD images.

Coherency Sensitive Hashing (CSH) extends Locality Sensitivity Hashing (LSH) and PatchMatch to quickly find matching patches between two images. LSH relies on hashing, which maps similar patches to the same bin, in order to find matching patches. PatchMatch, on the other hand, relies on the observation that images are coherent, to propagate good matches to their neighbors, in the image plane. It uses random patch assignment to seed the initial matching. CSH relies on hashing to seed the initial patch matching and on image coherence to propagate good matches. In addition, hashing lets it propagate information between patches with similar appearance (i.e., map to the same bin). This way, information is propagated much faster because it can use similarity in appearance space or neighborhood in the image plane. As a result, CSH is at least three to four times faster than PatchMatch and more accurate, especially in textured regions, where reconstruction artifacts are most noticeable to the human eye. We verified CSH on a new, large scale, data set of 133 image pairs.