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Kwang Moo Yi

Kwang Moo Yi contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

13 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Semantic Foam: Unifying Spatial and Semantic Scene Decomposition

Modern scene reconstruction methods, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting, deliver photo-realistic novel view synthesis at real-time speeds, yet their adoption in interactive graphics applications has been limited. A major bottleneck is the difficulty of interacting with these representations compared to traditional, human-authored 3D assets. While previous research has attempted to impose semantic decomposition on these models, significant challenges remain regarding segmentation quality and consistency. To address this, we introduce Semantic Foam, extending the recently proposed Radiant Foam representations to semantic decomposition tasks. Our approach integrates the natural spatial volumetric decomposition of Radiant Foam's Voronoi mesh with an explicit semantic feature field parameterized at the cell level. This explicit structure enables direct spatial regularization, which prevents artifacts caused by occlusion or inconsistent supervision across views - common pitfalls for other point-based representations. Experimental results show that our method achieves superior object-level segmentation performance compared to state-of-the-art methods like Gaussian Grouping and SAGA.

preprint2023arXiv

TUSK: Task-Agnostic Unsupervised Keypoints

Existing unsupervised methods for keypoint learning rely heavily on the assumption that a specific keypoint type (e.g. elbow, digit, abstract geometric shape) appears only once in an image. This greatly limits their applicability, as each instance must be isolated before applying the method-an issue that is never discussed or evaluated. We thus propose a novel method to learn Task-agnostic, UnSupervised Keypoints (TUSK) which can deal with multiple instances. To achieve this, instead of the commonly-used strategy of detecting multiple heatmaps, each dedicated to a specific keypoint type, we use a single heatmap for detection, and enable unsupervised learning of keypoint types through clustering. Specifically, we encode semantics into the keypoints by teaching them to reconstruct images from a sparse set of keypoints and their descriptors, where the descriptors are forced to form distinct clusters in feature space around learned prototypes. This makes our approach amenable to a wider range of tasks than any previous unsupervised keypoint method: we show experiments on multiple-instance detection and classification, object discovery, and landmark detection-all unsupervised-with performance on par with the state of the art, while also being able to deal with multiple instances.

preprint2022arXiv

Estimating Visual Information From Audio Through Manifold Learning

We propose a new framework for extracting visual information about a scene only using audio signals. Audio-based methods can overcome some of the limitations of vision-based methods i.e., they do not require "line-of-sight", are robust to occlusions and changes in illumination, and can function as a backup in case vision/lidar sensors fail. Therefore, audio-based methods can be useful even for applications in which only visual information is of interest Our framework is based on Manifold Learning and consists of two steps. First, we train a Vector-Quantized Variational Auto-Encoder to learn the data manifold of the particular visual modality we are interested in. Second, we train an Audio Transformation network to map multi-channel audio signals to the latent representation of the corresponding visual sample. We show that our method is able to produce meaningful images from audio using a publicly available audio/visual dataset. In particular, we consider the prediction of the following visual modalities from audio: depth and semantic segmentation. We hope the findings of our work can facilitate further research in visual information extraction from audio. Code is available at: https://github.com/ubc-vision/audio_manifold.

preprint2022arXiv

FlowNet-PET: Unsupervised Learning to Perform Respiratory Motion Correction in PET Imaging

To correct for respiratory motion in PET imaging, an interpretable and unsupervised deep learning technique, FlowNet-PET, was constructed. The network was trained to predict the optical flow between two PET frames from different breathing amplitude ranges. The trained model aligns different retrospectively-gated PET images, providing a final image with similar counting statistics as a non-gated image, but without the blurring effects. FlowNet-PET was applied to anthropomorphic digital phantom data, which provided the possibility to design robust metrics to quantify the corrections. When comparing the predicted optical flows to the ground truths, the median absolute error was found to be smaller than the pixel and slice widths. The improvements were illustrated by comparing against images without motion and computing the intersection over union (IoU) of the tumors as well as the enclosed activity and coefficient of variation (CoV) within the no-motion tumor volume before and after the corrections were applied. The average relative improvements provided by the network were 64%, 89%, and 75% for the IoU, total activity, and CoV, respectively. FlowNet-PET achieved similar results as the conventional retrospective phase binning approach, but only required one sixth of the scan duration. The code and data have been made publicly available (https://github.com/teaghan/FlowNet_PET).

preprint2022arXiv

Kubric: A scalable dataset generator

Data is the driving force of machine learning, with the amount and quality of training data often being more important for the performance of a system than architecture and training details. But collecting, processing and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and frequently raises additional privacy, fairness and legal concerns. Synthetic data is a powerful tool with the potential to address these shortcomings: 1) it is cheap 2) supports rich ground-truth annotations 3) offers full control over data and 4) can circumvent or mitigate problems regarding bias, privacy and licensing. Unfortunately, software tools for effective data generation are less mature than those for architecture design and training, which leads to fragmented generation efforts. To address these problems we introduce Kubric, an open-source Python framework that interfaces with PyBullet and Blender to generate photo-realistic scenes, with rich annotations, and seamlessly scales to large jobs distributed over thousands of machines, and generating TBs of data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Kubric by presenting a series of 13 different generated datasets for tasks ranging from studying 3D NeRF models to optical flow estimation. We release Kubric, the used assets, all of the generation code, as well as the rendered datasets for reuse and modification.

preprint2022arXiv

LOLNeRF: Learn from One Look

We present a method for learning a generative 3D model based on neural radiance fields, trained solely from data with only single views of each object. While generating realistic images is no longer a difficult task, producing the corresponding 3D structure such that they can be rendered from different views is non-trivial. We show that, unlike existing methods, one does not need multi-view data to achieve this goal. Specifically, we show that by reconstructing many images aligned to an approximate canonical pose with a single network conditioned on a shared latent space, you can learn a space of radiance fields that models shape and appearance for a class of objects. We demonstrate this by training models to reconstruct object categories using datasets that contain only one view of each subject without depth or geometry information. Our experiments show that we achieve state-of-the-art results in novel view synthesis and high-quality results for monocular depth prediction.

preprint2022arXiv

NeuralBF: Neural Bilateral Filtering for Top-down Instance Segmentation on Point Clouds

We introduce a method for instance proposal generation for 3D point clouds. Existing techniques typically directly regress proposals in a single feed-forward step, leading to inaccurate estimation. We show that this serves as a critical bottleneck, and propose a method based on iterative bilateral filtering with learned kernels. Following the spirit of bilateral filtering, we consider both the deep feature embeddings of each point, as well as their locations in the 3D space. We show via synthetic experiments that our method brings drastic improvements when generating instance proposals for a given point of interest. We further validate our method on the challenging ScanNet benchmark, achieving the best instance segmentation performance amongst the sub-category of top-down methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Repurposing Existing Deep Networks for Caption and Aesthetic-Guided Image Cropping

We propose a novel optimization framework that crops a given image based on user description and aesthetics. Unlike existing image cropping methods, where one typically trains a deep network to regress to crop parameters or cropping actions, we propose to directly optimize for the cropping parameters by repurposing pre-trained networks on image captioning and aesthetic tasks, without any fine-tuning, thereby avoiding training a separate network. Specifically, we search for the best crop parameters that minimize a combined loss of the initial objectives of these networks. To make the optimization table, we propose three strategies: (i) multi-scale bilinear sampling, (ii) annealing the scale of the crop region, therefore effectively reducing the parameter space, (iii) aggregation of multiple optimization results. Through various quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we show that our framework can produce crops that are well-aligned to intended user descriptions and aesthetically pleasing.

preprint2021arXiv

ACNe: Attentive Context Normalization for Robust Permutation-Equivariant Learning

Many problems in computer vision require dealing with sparse, unordered data in the form of point clouds. Permutation-equivariant networks have become a popular solution-they operate on individual data points with simple perceptrons and extract contextual information with global pooling. This can be achieved with a simple normalization of the feature maps, a global operation that is unaffected by the order. In this paper, we propose Attentive Context Normalization (ACN), a simple yet effective technique to build permutation-equivariant networks robust to outliers. Specifically, we show how to normalize the feature maps with weights that are estimated within the network, excluding outliers from this normalization. We use this mechanism to leverage two types of attention: local and global-by combining them, our method is able to find the essential data points in high-dimensional space to solve a given task. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our approach, which we call Attentive Context Networks (ACNe), provides a significant leap in performance compared to the state-of-the-art on camera pose estimation, robust fitting, and point cloud classification under noise and outliers. Source code: https://github.com/vcg-uvic/acne.

preprint2021arXiv

Image Matching across Wide Baselines: From Paper to Practice

We introduce a comprehensive benchmark for local features and robust estimation algorithms, focusing on the downstream task -- the accuracy of the reconstructed camera pose -- as our primary metric. Our pipeline's modular structure allows easy integration, configuration, and combination of different methods and heuristics. This is demonstrated by embedding dozens of popular algorithms and evaluating them, from seminal works to the cutting edge of machine learning research. We show that with proper settings, classical solutions may still outperform the perceived state of the art. Besides establishing the actual state of the art, the conducted experiments reveal unexpected properties of Structure from Motion (SfM) pipelines that can help improve their performance, for both algorithmic and learned methods. Data and code are online https://github.com/vcg-uvic/image-matching-benchmark, providing an easy-to-use and flexible framework for the benchmarking of local features and robust estimation methods, both alongside and against top-performing methods. This work provides a basis for the Image Matching Challenge https://vision.uvic.ca/image-matching-challenge.

preprint2020arXiv

Assessing the performance of LTE and NLTE synthetic stellar spectra in a machine learning framework

In the current era of stellar spectroscopic surveys, synthetic spectral libraries are the basis for the derivation of stellar parameters and chemical abundances. In this paper, we compare the stellar parameters determined using five popular synthetic spectral grids (INTRIGOSS, FERRE, AMBRE, PHOENIX, and MPIA/1DNLTE) with our convolutional neural network (CNN, $\texttt{StarNet}$). The stellar parameters are determined for six physical properties (effective temperature, surface gravity, metallicity, [$α$/Fe], radial velocity, and rotational velocity) given the spectral resolution, signal-to-noise, and wavelength range of optical FLAMES-UVES spectra from the Gaia-ESO Survey. Both CNN modelling and epistemic uncertainties are incorporated through training an ensemble of networks. $\texttt{StarNet}$ training was also adapted to mitigate differences between the synthetic grids and observed spectra by augmenting with realistic observational signatures (i.e. resolution matching, wavelength sampling, Gaussian noise, zeroing flux values, rotational and radial velocities, continuum removal, and masking telluric regions). Using the FLAMES-UVES spectra for FGK type dwarfs and giants as a test set, we quantify the accuracy and precision of the stellar label predictions from $\texttt{StarNet}$. We find excellent results over a wide range of parameters when $\texttt{StarNet}$ is trained on the MPIA/1DNLTE synthetic grid, and acceptable results over smaller parameter ranges when trained on the 1DLTE grids. These tests also show that our CNN pipeline is highly adaptable to multiple simulation grids.

preprint2020arXiv

Eigendecomposition-Free Training of Deep Networks for Linear Least-Square Problems

Many classical Computer Vision problems, such as essential matrix computation and pose estimation from 3D to 2D correspondences, can be tackled by solving a linear least-square problem, which can be done by finding the eigenvector corresponding to the smallest, or zero, eigenvalue of a matrix representing a linear system. Incorporating this in deep learning frameworks would allow us to explicitly encode known notions of geometry, instead of having the network implicitly learn them from data. However, performing eigendecomposition within a network requires the ability to differentiate this operation. While theoretically doable, this introduces numerical instability in the optimization process in practice. In this paper, we introduce an eigendecomposition-free approach to training a deep network whose loss depends on the eigenvector corresponding to a zero eigenvalue of a matrix predicted by the network. We demonstrate that our approach is much more robust than explicit differentiation of the eigendecomposition using two general tasks, outlier rejection and denoising, with several practical examples including wide-baseline stereo, the perspective-n-point problem, and ellipse fitting. Empirically, our method has better convergence properties and yields state-of-the-art results.

preprint2020arXiv

Optimizing Through Learned Errors for Accurate Sports Field Registration

We propose an optimization-based framework to register sports field templates onto broadcast videos. For accurate registration we go beyond the prevalent feed-forward paradigm. Instead, we propose to train a deep network that regresses the registration error, and then register images by finding the registration parameters that minimize the regressed error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by applying it to real-world sports broadcast videos, outperforming the state of the art. We further apply our method on a synthetic toy example and demonstrate that our method brings significant gains even when the problem is simplified and unlimited training data is available.