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Quantization of Deep Neural Network (DNN) activations is a commonly used technique to reduce compute and memory demands during DNN inference, which can be particularly beneficial on resource-constrained devices. To achieve high accuracy, existing methods for quantizing activations rely on complex mathematical computations or perform extensive searches for the best hyper-parameters. However, these expensive operations are impractical on devices with limited computation capabilities, memory capacities, and energy budgets. Furthermore, many existing methods do not focus on sub-6-bit (or deep) quantization. To fill these gaps, in this paper we propose DQA (Deep Quantization of DNN Activations), a new method that focuses on sub-6-bit quantization of activations and leverages simple shifting-based operations and Huffman coding to be efficient and achieve high accuracy. We evaluate DQA with 3, 4, and 5-bit quantization levels and three different DNN models for two different tasks, image classification and image segmentation, on two different datasets. DQA shows significantly better accuracy (up to 29.28%) compared to the direct quantization method and the state-of-the-art NoisyQuant for sub-6-bit quantization., Comment: Accepted to Second Workshop on Machine Learning with New Compute Paradigms at NeurIPS 2024 (MLNCP 2024)

We propose an unsupervised image segmentation method using features from pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models. Inspired by classic spectral clustering approaches, we construct adjacency matrices from self-attention layers between image patches and recursively partition using Normalised Cuts. A key insight is that self-attention probability distributions, which capture semantic relations between patches, can be interpreted as a transition matrix for random walks across the image. We leverage this by first using Random Walk Normalized Cuts directly on these self-attention activations to partition the image, minimizing transition probabilities between clusters while maximizing coherence within clusters. Applied recursively, this yields a hierarchical segmentation that reflects the rich semantics in the pre-trained attention layers, without any additional training. Next, we explore other ways to build the NCuts adjacency matrix from features, and how we can use the random walk interpretation of self-attention to capture long-range relationships. Finally, we propose an approach to automatically determine the NCut cost criterion, avoiding the need to tune this manually. We quantitatively analyse the effect incorporating different features, a constant versus dynamic NCut threshold, and incorporating multi-node paths when constructing the NCuts adjacency matrix. We show that our approach surpasses all existing methods for zero-shot unsupervised segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art results on COCO-Stuff-27 and Cityscapes.

Accurately detecting and classifying damage in analogue media such as paintings, photographs, textiles, mosaics, and frescoes is essential for cultural heritage preservation. While machine learning models excel in correcting degradation if the damage operator is known a priori, we show that they fail to robustly predict where the damage is even after supervised training; thus, reliable damage detection remains a challenge. Motivated by this, we introduce ARTeFACT, a dataset for damage detection in diverse types analogue media, with over 11,000 annotations covering 15 kinds of damage across various subjects, media, and historical provenance. Furthermore, we contribute human-verified text prompts describing the semantic contents of the images, and derive additional textual descriptions of the annotated damage. We evaluate CNN, Transformer, diffusion-based segmentation models, and foundation vision models in zero-shot, supervised, unsupervised and text-guided settings, revealing their limitations in generalising across media types. Our dataset is available at $\href{https://daniela997.github.io/ARTeFACT/}{https://daniela997.github.io/ARTeFACT/}$ as the first-of-its-kind benchmark for analogue media damage detection and restoration., Comment: Accepted for publication at WACV 2025

Human motion analysis offers significant potential for healthcare monitoring and early detection of diseases. The advent of radar-based sensing systems has captured the spotlight for they are able to operate without physical contact and they can integrate with pre-existing Wi-Fi networks. They are also seen as less privacy-invasive compared to camera-based systems. However, recent research has shown high accuracy in recognizing subjects or gender from radar gait patterns, raising privacy concerns. This study addresses these issues by investigating privacy vulnerabilities in radar-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems and proposing a novel method for privacy preservation using Differential Privacy (DP) driven by attributions derived with Integrated Decision Gradient (IDG) algorithm. We investigate Black-box Membership Inference Attack (MIA) Models in HAR settings across various levels of attacker-accessible information. We extensively evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed IDG-DP method by designing a CNN-based HAR model and rigorously assessing its resilience against MIAs. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of IDG-DP in mitigating privacy attacks while maintaining utility across all settings, particularly excelling against label-only and shadow model black-box MIA attacks. This work represents a crucial step towards balancing the need for effective radar-based HAR with robust privacy protection in healthcare environments., Comment: Accepted at WACV 2025. 12 pages, 7 figures

We present Flat'n'Fold, a novel large-scale dataset for garment manipulation that addresses critical gaps in existing datasets. Comprising 1,212 human and 887 robot demonstrations of flattening and folding 44 unique garments across 8 categories, Flat'n'Fold surpasses prior datasets in size, scope, and diversity. Our dataset uniquely captures the entire manipulation process from crumpled to folded states, providing synchronized multi-view RGB-D images, point clouds, and action data, including hand or gripper positions and rotations. We quantify the dataset's diversity and complexity compared to existing benchmarks and show that our dataset features natural and diverse manipulations of real-world demonstrations of human and robot demonstrations in terms of visual and action information. To showcase Flat'n'Fold's utility, we establish new benchmarks for grasping point prediction and subtask decomposition. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models on these tasks reveals significant room for improvement. This underscores Flat'n'Fold's potential to drive advances in robotic perception and manipulation of deformable objects. Our dataset can be downloaded at https://cvas-ug.github.io/flat-n-fold

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation has shown promise in training models with limited labeled data and abundant unlabeled data. However, state-of-the-art methods ignore a potentially valuable source of unsupervised semantic information -- spatial registration transforms between image volumes. To address this, we propose CCT-R, a contrastive cross-teaching framework incorporating registration information. To leverage the semantic information available in registrations between volume pairs, CCT-R incorporates two proposed modules: Registration Supervision Loss (RSL) and Registration-Enhanced Positive Sampling (REPS). The RSL leverages segmentation knowledge derived from transforms between labeled and unlabeled volume pairs, providing an additional source of pseudo-labels. REPS enhances contrastive learning by identifying anatomically-corresponding positives across volumes using registration transforms. Experimental results on two challenging medical segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of CCT-R across various semi-supervised settings, with as few as one labeled case. Our code is available at https://github.com/kathyliu579/ContrastiveCross-teachingWithRegistration.

Accurately detecting and classifying damage in analogue media such as paintings, photographs, textiles, mosaics, and frescoes is essential for cultural heritage preservation. While machine learning models excel in correcting global degradation if the damage operator is known a priori, we show that they fail to predict where the damage is even after supervised training; thus, reliable damage detection remains a challenge. We introduce DamBench, a dataset for damage detection in diverse analogue media, with over 11,000 annotations covering 15 damage types across various subjects and media. We evaluate CNN, Transformer, and text-guided diffusion segmentation models, revealing their limitations in generalising across media types.

We present a latent diffusion model over 3D scenes, that can be trained using only 2D image data. To achieve this, we first design an autoencoder that maps multi-view images to 3D Gaussian splats, and simultaneously builds a compressed latent representation of these splats. Then, we train a multi-view diffusion model over the latent space to learn an efficient generative model. This pipeline does not require object masks nor depths, and is suitable for complex scenes with arbitrary camera positions. We conduct careful experiments on two large-scale datasets of complex real-world scenes -- MVImgNet and RealEstate10K. We show that our approach enables generating 3D scenes in as little as 0.2 seconds, either from scratch, from a single input view, or from sparse input views. It produces diverse and high-quality results while running an order of magnitude faster than non-latent diffusion models and earlier NeRF-based generative models

Capturing complex temporal relationships between video and audio modalities is vital for Audio-Visual Emotion Recognition (AVER). However, existing methods lack attention to local details, such as facial state changes between video frames, which can reduce the discriminability of features and thus lower recognition accuracy. In this paper, we propose a Detail-Enhanced Intra- and Inter-modal Interaction network(DE-III) for AVER, incorporating several novel aspects. We introduce optical flow information to enrich video representations with texture details that better capture facial state changes. A fusion module integrates the optical flow estimation with the corresponding video frames to enhance the representation of facial texture variations. We also design attentive intra- and inter-modal feature enhancement modules to further improve the richness and discriminability of video and audio representations. A detailed quantitative evaluation shows that our proposed model outperforms all existing methods on three benchmark datasets for both concrete and continuous emotion recognition. To encourage further research and ensure replicability, we will release our full code upon acceptance., Comment: Submitted to 27th International Conference of Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2024)

Human-annotated vision datasets inevitably contain a fraction of human mislabelled examples. While the detrimental effects of such mislabelling on supervised learning are well-researched, their influence on Supervised Contrastive Learning (SCL) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that human-labelling errors not only differ significantly from synthetic label errors, but also pose unique challenges in SCL, different to those in traditional supervised learning methods. Specifically, our results indicate they adversely impact the learning process in the ~99% of cases when they occur as false positive samples. Existing noise-mitigating methods primarily focus on synthetic label errors and tackle the unrealistic setting of very high synthetic noise rates (40-80%), but they often underperform on common image datasets due to overfitting. To address this issue, we introduce a novel SCL objective with robustness to human-labelling errors, SCL-RHE. SCL-RHE is designed to mitigate the effects of real-world mislabelled examples, typically characterized by much lower noise rates (<5%). We demonstrate that SCL-RHE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art representation learning and noise-mitigating methods across various vision benchmarks, by offering improved resilience against human-labelling errors., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2311.16481

Generating 3D scenes is a challenging open problem, which requires synthesizing plausible content that is fully consistent in 3D space. While recent methods such as neural radiance fields excel at view synthesis and 3D reconstruction, they cannot synthesize plausible details in unobserved regions since they lack a generative capability. Conversely, existing generative methods are typically not capable of reconstructing detailed, large-scale scenes in the wild, as they use limited-capacity 3D scene representations, require aligned camera poses, or rely on additional regularizers. In this work, we introduce the first diffusion model able to perform fast, detailed reconstruction and generation of real-world 3D scenes. To achieve this, we make three contributions. First, we introduce a new neural scene representation, IB-planes, that can efficiently and accurately represent large 3D scenes, dynamically allocating more capacity as needed to capture details visible in each image. Second, we propose a denoising-diffusion framework to learn a prior over this novel 3D scene representation, using only 2D images without the need for any additional supervision signal such as masks or depths. This supports 3D reconstruction and generation in a unified architecture. Third, we develop a principled approach to avoid trivial 3D solutions when integrating the image-based rendering with the diffusion model, by dropping out representations of some images. We evaluate the model on several challenging datasets of real and synthetic images, and demonstrate superior results on generation, novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction., Comment: Accepted at ICLR 2024. Project page: https://anciukevicius.github.io/generative-image-based-rendering

In this paper, we tackle the challenge of actively attending to visual scenes using a foveated sensor. We introduce an end-to-end differentiable foveated active vision architecture that leverages a graph convolutional network to process foveated images, and a simple yet effective formulation for foveated image sampling. Our model learns to iteratively attend to regions of the image relevant for classification. We conduct detailed experiments on a variety of image datasets, comparing the performance of our method with previous approaches to foveated vision while measuring how the impact of different choices, such as the degree of foveation, and the number of fixations the network performs, affect object recognition performance. We find that our model outperforms a state-of-the-art CNN and foveated vision architectures of comparable parameters and a given pixel or computation budget, Comment: Accepted at BMVC2023

Semi-supervised learning has demonstrated great potential in medical image segmentation by utilizing knowledge from unlabeled data. However, most existing approaches do not explicitly capture high-level semantic relations between distant regions, which limits their performance. In this paper, we focus on representation learning for semi-supervised learning, by developing a novel Multi-Scale Cross Supervised Contrastive Learning (MCSC) framework, to segment structures in medical images. We jointly train CNN and Transformer models, regularising their features to be semantically consistent across different scales. Our approach contrasts multi-scale features based on ground-truth and cross-predicted labels, in order to extract robust feature representations that reflect intra- and inter-slice relationships across the whole dataset. To tackle class imbalance, we take into account the prevalence of each class to guide contrastive learning and ensure that features adequately capture infrequent classes. Extensive experiments on two multi-structure medical segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MCSC. It not only outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods by more than 3.0% in Dice, but also greatly reduces the performance gap with fully supervised methods.

Digital scans of analogue photographic film typically contain artefacts such as dust and scratches. Automated removal of these is an important part of preservation and dissemination of photographs of historical and cultural importance. While state-of-the-art deep learning models have shown impressive results in general image inpainting and denoising, film artefact removal is an understudied problem. It has particularly challenging requirements, due to the complex nature of analogue damage, the high resolution of film scans, and potential ambiguities in the restoration. There are no publicly available high-quality datasets of real-world analogue film damage for training and evaluation, making quantitative studies impossible. We address the lack of ground-truth data for evaluation by collecting a dataset of 4K damaged analogue film scans paired with manually-restored versions produced by a human expert, allowing quantitative evaluation of restoration performance. We construct a larger synthetic dataset of damaged images with paired clean versions using a statistical model of artefact shape and occurrence learnt from real, heavily-damaged images. We carefully validate the realism of the simulated damage via a human perceptual study, showing that even expert users find our synthetic damage indistinguishable from real. In addition, we demonstrate that training with our synthetically damaged dataset leads to improved artefact segmentation performance when compared to previously proposed synthetic analogue damage. Finally, we use these datasets to train and analyse the performance of eight state-of-the-art image restoration methods on high-resolution scans. We compare both methods which directly perform the restoration task on scans with artefacts, and methods which require a damage mask to be provided for the inpainting of artefacts., Comment: Accepted as full paper at Eurographics 2023

Diffusion models currently achieve state-of-the-art performance for both conditional and unconditional image generation. However, so far, image diffusion models do not support tasks required for 3D understanding, such as view-consistent 3D generation or single-view object reconstruction. In this paper, we present RenderDiffusion, the first diffusion model for 3D generation and inference, trained using only monocular 2D supervision. Central to our method is a novel image denoising architecture that generates and renders an intermediate three-dimensional representation of a scene in each denoising step. This enforces a strong inductive structure within the diffusion process, providing a 3D consistent representation while only requiring 2D supervision. The resulting 3D representation can be rendered from any view. We evaluate RenderDiffusion on FFHQ, AFHQ, ShapeNet and CLEVR datasets, showing competitive performance for generation of 3D scenes and inference of 3D scenes from 2D images. Additionally, our diffusion-based approach allows us to use 2D inpainting to edit 3D scenes., Comment: Accepted at CVPR 2023. Project page: https://github.com/Anciukevicius/RenderDiffusion

The development of two-dimensional materials has resulted in a diverse range of novel, high-quality compounds with increasing complexity. A key requirement for a comprehensive quantitative theory is the accurate determination of these materials' band structure parameters. However, this task is challenging due to the intricate band structures and the indirect nature of experimental probes. In this work, we introduce a general framework to derive band structure parameters from experimental data using deep neural networks. We applied our method to the penetration field capacitance measurement of trilayer graphene, an effective probe of its density of states. First, we demonstrate that a trained deep network gives accurate predictions for the penetration field capacitance as a function of tight-binding parameters. Next, we use the fast and accurate predictions from the trained network to automatically determine tight-binding parameters directly from experimental data, with extracted parameters being in a good agreement with values in the literature. We conclude by discussing potential applications of our method to other materials and experimental techniques beyond penetration field capacitance., Comment: (v2): 12 pages, 6 figures, close to published version; (v1): 11 pages, 4 figures

Our goal in this work is to generate realistic videos given just one initial frame as input. Existing unsupervised approaches to this task do not consider the fact that a video typically shows a 3D environment, and that this should remain coherent from frame to frame even as the camera and objects move. We address this by developing a model that first estimates the latent 3D structure of the scene, including the segmentation of any moving objects. It then predicts future frames by simulating the object and camera dynamics, and rendering the resulting views. Importantly, it is trained end-to-end using only the unsupervised objective of predicting future frames, without any 3D information nor segmentation annotations. Experiments on two challenging datasets of natural videos show that our model can estimate 3D structure and motion segmentation from a single frame, and hence generate plausible and varied predictions.

Cold bent glass is a promising and cost-efficient method for realizing doubly curved glass fa\c{c}ades. They are produced by attaching planar glass sheets to curved frames and require keeping the occurring stress within safe limits. However, it is very challenging to navigate the design space of cold bent glass panels due to the fragility of the material, which impedes the form-finding for practically feasible and aesthetically pleasing cold bent glass fa\c{c}ades. We propose an interactive, data-driven approach for designing cold bent glass fa\c{c}ades that can be seamlessly integrated into a typical architectural design pipeline. Our method allows non-expert users to interactively edit a parametric surface while providing real-time feedback on the deformed shape and maximum stress of cold bent glass panels. Designs are automatically refined to minimize several fairness criteria while maximal stresses are kept within glass limits. We achieve interactive frame rates by using a differentiable Mixture Density Network trained from more than a million simulations. Given a curved boundary, our regression model is capable of handling multistable configurations and accurately predicting the equilibrium shape of the panel and its corresponding maximal stress. We show predictions are highly accurate and validate our results with a physical realization of a cold bent glass surface.

A natural approach to generative modeling of videos is to represent them as a composition of moving objects. Recent works model a set of 2D sprites over a slowly-varying background, but without considering the underlying 3D scene that gives rise to them. We instead propose to model a video as the view seen while moving through a scene with multiple 3D objects and a 3D background. Our model is trained from monocular videos without any supervision, yet learns to generate coherent 3D scenes containing several moving objects. We conduct detailed experiments on two datasets, going beyond the visual complexity supported by state-of-the-art generative approaches. We evaluate our method on depth-prediction and 3D object detection -- tasks which cannot be addressed by those earlier works -- and show it out-performs them even on 2D instance segmentation and tracking., Comment: Appeared at NeurIPS 2020. Project page: http://pmh47.net/o3v/

Numerous methods have been proposed for probabilistic generative modelling of 3D objects. However, none of these is able to produce textured objects, which renders them of limited use for practical tasks. In this work, we present the first generative model of textured 3D meshes. Training such a model would traditionally require a large dataset of textured meshes, but unfortunately, existing datasets of meshes lack detailed textures. We instead propose a new training methodology that allows learning from collections of 2D images without any 3D information. To do so, we train our model to explain a distribution of images by modelling each image as a 3D foreground object placed in front of a 2D background. Thus, it learns to generate meshes that when rendered, produce images similar to those in its training set. A well-known problem when generating meshes with deep networks is the emergence of self-intersections, which are problematic for many use-cases. As a second contribution we therefore introduce a new generation process for 3D meshes that guarantees no self-intersections arise, based on the physical intuition that faces should push one another out of the way as they move. We conduct extensive experiments on our approach, reporting quantitative and qualitative results on both synthetic data and natural images. These show our method successfully learns to generate plausible and diverse textured 3D samples for five challenging object classes., Comment: CVPR 2020 (oral)

We present a generative model of images that explicitly reasons over the set of objects they show. Our model learns a structured latent representation that separates objects from each other and from the background; unlike prior works, it explicitly represents the 2D position and depth of each object, as well as an embedding of its segmentation mask and appearance. The model can be trained from images alone in a purely unsupervised fashion without the need for object masks or depth information. Moreover, it always generates complete objects, even though a significant fraction of training images contain occlusions. Finally, we show that our model can infer decompositions of novel images into their constituent objects, including accurate prediction of depth ordering and segmentation of occluded parts.

We present a unified framework tackling two problems: class-specific 3D reconstruction from a single image, and generation of new 3D shape samples. These tasks have received considerable attention recently; however, most existing approaches rely on 3D supervision, annotation of 2D images with keypoints or poses, and/or training with multiple views of each object instance. Our framework is very general: it can be trained in similar settings to existing approaches, while also supporting weaker supervision. Importantly, it can be trained purely from 2D images, without pose annotations, and with only a single view per instance. We employ meshes as an output representation, instead of voxels used in most prior work. This allows us to reason over lighting parameters and exploit shading information during training, which previous 2D-supervised methods cannot. Thus, our method can learn to generate and reconstruct concave object classes. We evaluate our approach in various settings, showing that: (i) it learns to disentangle shape from pose and lighting; (ii) using shading in the loss improves performance compared to just silhouettes; (iii) when using a standard single white light, our model outperforms state-of-the-art 2D-supervised methods, both with and without pose supervision, thanks to exploiting shading cues; (iv) performance improves further when using multiple coloured lights, even approaching that of state-of-the-art 3D-supervised methods; (v) shapes produced by our model capture smooth surfaces and fine details better than voxel-based approaches; and (vi) our approach supports concave classes such as bathtubs and sofas, which methods based on silhouettes cannot learn., Comment: Extension of arXiv:1807.09259, accepted to IJCV. Differentiable renderer available at https://github.com/pmh47/dirt

We present a unified framework tackling two problems: class-specific 3D reconstruction from a single image, and generation of new 3D shape samples. These tasks have received considerable attention recently; however, existing approaches rely on 3D supervision, annotation of 2D images with keypoints or poses, and/or training with multiple views of each object instance. Our framework is very general: it can be trained in similar settings to these existing approaches, while also supporting weaker supervision scenarios. Importantly, it can be trained purely from 2D images, without ground-truth pose annotations, and with a single view per instance. We employ meshes as an output representation, instead of voxels used in most prior work. This allows us to exploit shading information during training, which previous 2D-supervised methods cannot. Thus, our method can learn to generate and reconstruct concave object classes. We evaluate our approach on synthetic data in various settings, showing that (i) it learns to disentangle shape from pose; (ii) using shading in the loss improves performance; (iii) our model is comparable or superior to state-of-the-art voxel-based approaches on quantitative metrics, while producing results that are visually more pleasing; (iv) it still performs well when given supervision weaker than in prior works., Comment: BMVC 2018 (Oral). Differentiable renderer available at https://github.com/pmh47/dirt

Efficient authoring of vast virtual environments hinges on algorithms that are able to automatically generate content while also being controllable. We propose a method to automatically generate furniture layouts for indoor environments. Our method is simple, efficient, human-interpretable and amenable to a wide variety of constraints. We model the composition of rooms into classes of objects and learn joint (co-occurrence) statistics from a database of training layouts. We generate new layouts by performing a sequence of conditional sampling steps, exploiting the statistics learned from the database. The generated layouts are specified as 3D object models, along with their positions and orientations. We show they are of equivalent perceived quality to the training layouts, and compare favorably to a state-of-the-art method. We incorporate constraints using a general mechanism -- rejection sampling -- which provides great flexibility at the cost of extra computation. We demonstrate the versatility of our method by applying a wide variety of constraints relevant to real-world applications.

We present a method for training CNN-based object class detectors directly using mean average precision (mAP) as the training loss, in a truly end-to-end fashion that includes non-maximum suppression (NMS) at training time. This contrasts with the traditional approach of training a CNN for a window classification loss, then applying NMS only at test time, when mAP is used as the evaluation metric in place of classification accuracy. However, mAP following NMS forms a piecewise-constant structured loss over thousands of windows, with gradients that do not convey useful information for gradient descent. Hence, we define new, general gradient-like quantities for piecewise constant functions, which have wide applicability. We describe how to calculate these efficiently for mAP following NMS, enabling to train a detector based on Fast R-CNN directly for mAP. This model achieves equivalent performance to the standard Fast R-CNN on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets, while being conceptually more appealing as the very same model and loss are used at both training and test time., Comment: This version has minor additions to results (ablation study) and discussion

Minimisation of discrete energies defined over factors is an important problem in computer vision, and a vast number of MAP inference algorithms have been proposed. Different inference algorithms perform better on factor graph models (GMs) from different underlying problem classes, and in general it is difficult to know which algorithm will yield the lowest energy for a given GM. To mitigate this difficulty, survey papers advise the practitioner on what algorithms perform well on what classes of models. We take the next step forward, and present a technique to automatically select the best inference algorithm for an input GM. We validate our method experimentally on an extended version of the OpenGM2 benchmark, containing a diverse set of vision problems. On average, our method selects an inference algorithm yielding labellings with 96% of variables the same as the best available algorithm.

Rural poverty and wide-ranging environmental concerns are some of the problems driving a growing public debate on rural issues across the United Kingdom. This briefing paper assesses the contribution that a community development approach can make to these issues. Rural areas have a long history of collective action, from farm families helping each other at harvest time to communal efforts to provide village services, schools, carnivals, and drama events. Recent decades have seen increasing outside efforts to influence policies, decisions, and trends that threaten local areas, such as school closings, environmental issues, and large new housing developments. The role and challenge of community development is to reinforce local collective action where it is already occurring, and encourage more communities to acquire the confidence and skills to take collective action. Chapters set the rural context; identify broad trends related to rural population, changing employment, declining services, the market economy, and rural-urban conflicts about the environment; provide examples of effective community work around village services, schools, community centers, housing, economic development, village appraisals, and environmental action; and identify the main agencies and programs in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The booklet concludes by recommending consolidation of the community work occupation; promotion of a community approach; appreciation of the Europe-wide perspective; a reappraisal of values; development of political responsibility and citizenship; and adoption of a more strategic approach. Contains 19 references and 29 organizational contacts in the United Kingdom and Europe. (TD)