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Christophe De Vleeschouwer

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Published work

16 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

CAD-Free Learning of Spacecraft Pose Estimators via NeRF-Based Augmentations

Spacecraft pose estimation networks require tens of thousands of CAD-rendered images to be trained. This reliance on synthetic CAD data (i) limits applicability to targets with reliable geometry prior, excluding uncooperative or poorly documented spacecraft, and (ii) causes poor generalization to real on-orbit conditions due to unrealistic illumination and material appearance. This paper introduces a NeRF-based image augmentation method that enables the learning of spacecraft pose estimators from only a few tens to a few hundreds of images. The method learns a Neural Radiance Field of the target and generates a large, diverse dataset through geometrically-consistent viewpoint and appearance augmentation. This augmented dataset enables the training of accurate target-specific pose estimators without requiring a CAD model or large synthetic datasets. Experiments show that our approach supports the training of accurate pose estimators from only 25 to 400 realistic images, even under severe illumination variations. When applied on large CAD-based synthetic datasets, the NeRF-based augmentation also enhances out-of-domain generalization, yielding improved robustness to real on-orbit conditions.

preprint2026arXiv

Conditional Random Fields for Interactive Refinement of Histopathological Predictions

Assisting pathologists in the analysis of histopathological images has high clinical value, as it supports cancer detection and staging. In this context, histology foundation models have recently emerged. Among them, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide strong yet imperfect zero-shot predictions. We propose to refine these predictions by adapting Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to histopathological applications, requiring no additional model training. We present HistoCRF, a CRF-based framework, with a novel definition of the pairwise potential that promotes label diversity and leverages expert annotations. We consider three experiments: without annotations, with expert annotations, and with iterative human-in-the-loop annotations that progressively correct misclassified patches. Experiments on five patch-level classification datasets covering different organs and diseases demonstrate average accuracy gains of 16.0% without annotations and 27.5% with only 100 annotations, compared to zero-shot predictions. Moreover, integrating a human in the loop reaches a further gain of 32.6% with the same number of annotations. The code will be made available on https://github.com/tgodelaine/HistoCRF.

preprint2026arXiv

NeRF-based Spacecraft Reconstruction from Monocular Imagery Under Illumination Variability and Pose Uncertainty

Autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations around uncooperative, unknown spacecraft are critical for active debris removal and on-orbit servicing missions. A key component of such operations is the offline reconstruction of a 3D model of the target from a set of 2D images. This task is challenging due to two main factors. First, in-orbit illumination conditions exhibit considerable variability, and change rapidly over time. Second, the inaccuracy of pose information in the images, results in 3D reconstruction uncertainty. To overcome these challenges, we propose to extend Neural Radiance Fields with per-image degrees of freedom: a learnable appearance embedding that captures the illumination conditions specific to each image, and an image-specific pose correction term that refines its noisy pose label to increase 3D consistency across images. These parameters add minimal complexity, as they are learned jointly with the NeRF, yet they substantially improve robustness to illumination variability and pose inaccuracies. We validate our approach on three image sets representative of in-orbit operations, demonstrating its effectiveness for offline reconstruction and highlighting its suitability for online reconstruction, an open problem in the field.

preprint2022arXiv

Accelerating the creation of instance segmentation training sets through bounding box annotation

Collecting image annotations remains a significant burden when deploying CNN in a specific applicative context. This is especially the case when the annotation consists in binary masks covering object instances. Our work proposes to delineate instances in three steps, based on a semi-automatic approach: (1) the extreme points of an object (left-most, right-most, top, bottom pixels) are manually defined, thereby providing the object bounding-box, (2) a universal automatic segmentation tool like Deep Extreme Cut is used to turn the bounded object into a segmentation mask that matches the extreme points; and (3) the predicted mask is manually corrected. Various strategies are then investigated to balance the human manual annotation resources between bounding-box definition and mask correction, including when the correction of instance masks is prioritized based on their overlap with other instance bounding-boxes, or the outcome of an instance segmentation model trained on a partially annotated dataset. Our experimental study considers a teamsport player segmentation task, and measures how the accuracy of the Panoptic-Deeplab instance segmentation model depends on the human annotation resources allocation strategy. It reveals that the sole definition of extreme points results in a model accuracy that would require up to 10 times more resources if the masks were defined through fully manual delineation of instances. When targeting higher accuracies, prioritizing the mask correction among the training set instances is also shown to save up to 80\% of correction annotation resources compared to a systematic frame by frame correction of instances, for a same trained instance segmentation model accuracy.

preprint2022arXiv

Poly-CAM: High resolution class activation map for convolutional neural networks

The need for Explainable AI is increasing with the development of deep learning. The saliency maps derived from convolutional neural networks generally fail in localizing with accuracy the image features justifying the network prediction. This is because those maps are either low-resolution as for CAM [Zhou et al., 2016], or smooth as for perturbation-based methods [Zeiler and Fergus, 2014], or do correspond to a large number of widespread peaky spots as for gradient-based approaches [Sundararajan et al., 2017, Smilkov et al., 2017]. In contrast, our work proposes to combine the information from earlier network layers with the one from later layers to produce a high resolution Class Activation Map that is competitive with the previous art in term of insertion-deletion faithfulness metrics, while outperforming it in term of precision of class-specific features localization.

preprint2021arXiv

Adapting JPEG XS gains and priorities to tasks and contents

Most current research in the domain of image compression focuses solely on achieving state of the art compression ratio, but that is not always usable in today's workflow due to the constraints on computing resources. Constant market requirements for a low-complexity image codec have led to the recent development and standardization of a lightweight image codec named JPEG XS. In this work we show that JPEG XS compression can be adapted to a specific given task and content, such as preserving visual quality on desktop content or maintaining high accuracy in neural network segmentation tasks, by optimizing its gain and priority parameters using the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy.

preprint2020arXiv

How semantic and geometric information mutually reinforce each other in ToF object localization

We propose a novel approach to localize a 3D object from the intensity and depth information images provided by a Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensor. Our method uses two CNNs. The first one uses raw depth and intensity images as input, to segment the floor pixels, from which the extrinsic parameters of the camera are estimated. The second CNN is in charge of segmenting the object-of-interest. As a main innovation, it exploits the calibration estimated from the prediction of the first CNN to represent the geometric depth information in a coordinate system that is attached to the ground, and is thus independent of the camera elevation. In practice, both the height of pixels with respect to the ground, and the orientation of normals to the point cloud are provided as input to the second CNN. Given the segmentation predicted by the second CNN, the object is localized based on point cloud alignment with a reference model. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed two-step approach improves segmentation and localization accuracy by a significant margin compared to a conventional CNN architecture, ignoring calibration and height maps, but also compared to PointNet++.

preprint2019arXiv

Natural Image Noise Dataset

Convolutional neural networks have been the focus of research aiming to solve image denoising problems, but their performance remains unsatisfactory for most applications. These networks are trained with synthetic noise distributions that do not accurately reflect the noise captured by image sensors. Some datasets of clean-noisy image pairs have been introduced but they are usually meant for benchmarking or specific applications. We introduce the Natural Image Noise Dataset (NIND), a dataset of DSLR-like images with varying levels of ISO noise which is large enough to train models for blind denoising over a wide range of noise. We demonstrate a denoising model trained with the NIND and show that it significantly outperforms BM3D on ISO noise from unseen images, even when generalizing to images from a different type of camera. The Natural Image Noise Dataset is published on Wikimedia Commons such that it remains open for curation and contributions. We expect that this dataset will prove useful for future image denoising applications.

preprint2016arXiv

Cell segmentation with random ferns and graph-cuts

The progress in imaging techniques have allowed the study of various aspect of cellular mechanisms. To isolate individual cells in live imaging data, we introduce an elegant image segmentation framework that effectively extracts cell boundaries, even in the presence of poor edge details. Our approach works in two stages. First, we estimate pixel interior/border/exterior class probabilities using random ferns. Then, we use an energy minimization framework to compute boundaries whose localization is compliant with the pixel class probabilities. We validate our approach on a manually annotated dataset.

preprint2015arXiv

Consistent Basis Pursuit for Signal and Matrix Estimates in Quantized Compressed Sensing

This paper focuses on the estimation of low-complexity signals when they are observed through $M$ uniformly quantized compressive observations. Among such signals, we consider 1-D sparse vectors, low-rank matrices, or compressible signals that are well approximated by one of these two models. In this context, we prove the estimation efficiency of a variant of Basis Pursuit Denoise, called Consistent Basis Pursuit (CoBP), enforcing consistency between the observations and the re-observed estimate, while promoting its low-complexity nature. We show that the reconstruction error of CoBP decays like $M^{-1/4}$ when all parameters but $M$ are fixed. Our proof is connected to recent bounds on the proximity of vectors or matrices when (i) those belong to a set of small intrinsic "dimension", as measured by the Gaussian mean width, and (ii) they share the same quantized (dithered) random projections. By solving CoBP with a proximal algorithm, we provide some extensive numerical observations that confirm the theoretical bound as $M$ is increased, displaying even faster error decay than predicted. The same phenomenon is observed in the special, yet important case of 1-bit CS.

preprint2015arXiv

Discriminative and Efficient Label Propagation on Complementary Graphs for Multi-Object Tracking

Given a set of detections, detected at each time instant independently, we investigate how to associate them across time. This is done by propagating labels on a set of graphs, each graph capturing how either the spatio-temporal or the appearance cues promote the assignment of identical or distinct labels to a pair of detections. The graph construction is motivated by a locally linear embedding of the detection features. Interestingly, the neighborhood of a node in appearance graph is defined to include all the nodes for which the appearance feature is available (even if they are temporally distant). This gives our framework the uncommon ability to exploit the appearance features that are available only sporadically. Once the graphs have been defined, multi-object tracking is formulated as the problem of finding a label assignment that is consistent with the constraints captured each graph, which results into a difference of convex (DC) program. We propose to decompose the global objective function into node-wise sub-problems. This not only allows a computationally efficient solution, but also supports an incremental and scalable construction of the graph, thereby making the framework applicable to large graphs and practical tracking scenarios. Moreover, it opens the possibility of parallel implementation.

preprint2015arXiv

Iterative hypothesis testing for multi-object tracking in presence of features with variable reliability

This paper assumes prior detections of multiple targets at each time instant, and uses a graph-based approach to connect those detections across time, based on their position and appearance estimates. In contrast to most earlier works in the field, our framework has been designed to exploit the appearance features, even when they are only sporadically available, or affected by a non-stationary noise, along the sequence of detections. This is done by implementing an iterative hypothesis testing strategy to progressively aggregate the detections into short trajectories, named tracklets. Specifically, each iteration considers a node, named key-node, and investigates how to link this key-node with other nodes in its neighborhood, under the assumption that the target appearance is defined by the key-node appearance estimate. This is done through shortest path computation in a temporal neighborhood of the key-node. The approach is conservative in that it only aggregates the shortest paths that are sufficiently better compared to alternative paths. It is also multi-scale in that the size of the investigated neighborhood is increased proportionally to the number of detections already aggregated into the key-node. The multi-scale nature of the process and the progressive relaxation of its conservativeness makes it both computationally efficient and effective. Experimental validations are performed extensively on a toy example, a 15 minutes long multi-view basketball dataset, and other monocular pedestrian datasets.

preprint2013arXiv

Compressive Optical Deflectometric Tomography: A Constrained Total-Variation Minimization Approach

Optical Deflectometric Tomography (ODT) provides an accurate characterization of transparent materials whose complex surfaces present a real challenge for manufacture and control. In ODT, the refractive index map (RIM) of a transparent object is reconstructed by measuring light deflection under multiple orientations. We show that this imaging modality can be made "compressive", i.e., a correct RIM reconstruction is achievable with far less observations than required by traditional Filtered Back Projection (FBP) methods. Assuming a cartoon-shape RIM model, this reconstruction is driven by minimizing the map Total-Variation under a fidelity constraint with the available observations. Moreover, two other realistic assumptions are added to improve the stability of our approach: the map positivity and a frontier condition. Numerically, our method relies on an accurate ODT sensing model and on a primal-dual minimization scheme, including easily the sensing operator and the proposed RIM constraints. We conclude this paper by demonstrating the power of our method on synthetic and experimental data under various compressive scenarios. In particular, the compressiveness of the stabilized ODT problem is demonstrated by observing a typical gain of 20 dB compared to FBP at only 5% of 360 incident light angles for moderately noisy sensing.

preprint2013arXiv

Consistent Iterative Hard Thresholding For Signal Declipping

Clipping or saturation in audio signals is a very common problem in signal processing, for which, in the severe case, there is still no satisfactory solution. In such case, there is a tremendous loss of information, and traditional methods fail to appropriately recover the signal. We propose a novel approach for this signal restoration problem based on the framework of Iterative Hard Thresholding. This approach, which enforces the consistency of the reconstructed signal with the clipped observations, shows superior performance in comparison to the state-of-the-art declipping algorithms. This is confirmed on synthetic and on actual high-dimensional audio data processing, both on SNR and on subjective user listening evaluations.

preprint2013arXiv

Quantized Iterative Hard Thresholding: Bridging 1-bit and High-Resolution Quantized Compressed Sensing

In this work, we show that reconstructing a sparse signal from quantized compressive measurement can be achieved in an unified formalism whatever the (scalar) quantization resolution, i.e., from 1-bit to high resolution assumption. This is achieved by generalizing the iterative hard thresholding (IHT) algorithm and its binary variant (BIHT) introduced in previous works to enforce the consistency of the reconstructed signal with respect to the quantization model. The performance of this algorithm, simply called quantized IHT (QIHT), is evaluated in comparison with other approaches (e.g., IHT, basis pursuit denoise) for several quantization scenarios.

preprint2010arXiv

Invariant Spectral Hashing of Image Saliency Graph

Image hashing is the process of associating a short vector of bits to an image. The resulting summaries are useful in many applications including image indexing, image authentication and pattern recognition. These hashes need to be invariant under transformations of the image that result in similar visual content, but should drastically differ for conceptually distinct contents. This paper proposes an image hashing method that is invariant under rotation, scaling and translation of the image. The gist of our approach relies on the geometric characterization of salient point distribution in the image. This is achieved by the definition of a "saliency graph" connecting these points jointly with an image intensity function on the graph nodes. An invariant hash is then obtained by considering the spectrum of this function in the eigenvector basis of the Laplacian graph, that is, its graph Fourier transform. Interestingly, this spectrum is invariant under any relabeling of the graph nodes. The graph reveals geometric information of the image, making the hash robust to image transformation, yet distinct for different visual content. The efficiency of the proposed method is assessed on a set of MRI 2-D slices and on a database of faces.