Object Detection on Monocular Images with Two-Dimensional Canonical Correlation Analysis

Zifan Yu, Suya You

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-Task Object Detection from Monocular Images Using Multimodal RGB and Depth Data

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Accurate and robust detection objects from monocular images is a fundamental vision task. This paper describes a novel approach of holistic scene understanding that can simultaneously achieve multiple tasks of scene reconstruction and object detection from a single monocular camera. Rather than pursuing an independent solution for each individual task as most existing work does, we seek a globally optimal solution that holistically resolves the multiple perception and reasoning tasks in an effective manner. The approach explores the complementary properties of multimodal RGB imagery and depth data to improve scene perception tasks. It uniquely combines the techniques of canonical correlation analysis and deep learning to learn the most correlated features to maximize the modal cross-correlation for improving the performance and robustness of object detection in complex environments. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate and demonstrate the performances of the proposed approach.

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Yolo+FPN: 2D and 3D Fused Object Detection with an RGB-D Camera

Ya Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Yolo+FPN: Combining 2D and 3D Object Detection for Real-Time Object Detection

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In this paper we propose a new deep neural network system, called Yolo+FPN, which fuses both 2D and 3D object detection algorithms to achieve better real-time object detection results and faster inference speed, to be used on real robots. Finding an optimized fusion strategy to efficiently combine 3D object detection with 2D detection information is useful and challenging for both indoor and outdoor robots. In order to satisfy real-time requirements, a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency is needed. We not only have improved training and test accuracies and lower mean losses on the KITTI object detection benchmark, but also achieve better average precision on 3D detection of all classes in three levels of difficulty. Also, we implemented Yolo+FPN system using an RGB-D camera, and compared the speed of 2D and 3D object detection using different GPUs. For the real implementation of both indoor and outdoor scenes, we focus on person detection, which is the most challenging and important among the three classes.

Detecting Objects with High Object Region Percentage

Fen Fang, Qianli Xu, Liyuan Li, Ying Gu, Joo-Hwee Lim

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Auto-TLDR; Faster R-CNN for High-ORP Object Detection

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Object shape is a subtle but important factor for object detection. It has been observed that the object-region-percentage (ORP) can be utilized to improve detection accuracy for elongated objects, which have much lower ORPs than other types of objects. In this paper, we propose an approach to improve the detection performance for objects whose ORPs are relatively higher.To address the problem of high-ORP object detection, we propose a method consisting of three steps. First, we adjust the ground truth bounding boxes of high-ORP objects to an optimal range. Second, we train an object detector, Faster R-CNN, based on adjusted bounding boxes to achieve high recall. Finally, we train a DCNN to learn the adjustment ratios towards four directions and adjust detected bounding boxes of objects to get better localization for higher precision. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on 12 high-ORP objects in COCO and 8 objects in a proprietary gearbox dataset. The experimental results show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on these objects while costing less resources in training and inference stages.

HPERL: 3D Human Pose Estimastion from RGB and LiDAR

Michael Fürst, Shriya T.P. Gupta, René Schuster, Oliver Wasenmüler, Didier Stricker

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Auto-TLDR; 3D Human Pose Estimation Using RGB and LiDAR Using Weakly-Supervised Approach

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In-the-wild human pose estimation has a huge potential for various fields, ranging from animation and action recognition to intention recognition and prediction for autonomous driving. The current state-of-the-art is focused only on RGB and RGB-D approaches for predicting the 3D human pose. However, not using precise LiDAR depth information limits the performance and leads to very inaccurate absolute pose estimation. With LiDAR sensors becoming more affordable and common on robots and autonomous vehicle setups, we propose an end-to-end architecture using RGB and LiDAR to predict the absolute 3D human pose with unprecedented precision. Additionally, we introduce a weakly-supervised approach to generate 3D predictions using 2D pose annotations from PedX. This allows for many new opportunities in the field of 3D human pose estimation.

Real-Time Monocular Depth Estimation with Extremely Light-Weight Neural Network

Mian Jhong Chiu, Wei-Chen Chiu, Hua-Tsung Chen, Jen-Hui Chuang

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Auto-TLDR; Real-Time Light-Weight Depth Prediction for Obstacle Avoidance and Environment Sensing with Deep Learning-based CNN

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Obstacle avoidance and environment sensing are crucial applications in autonomous driving and robotics. Among all types of sensors, RGB camera is widely used in these applications as it can offer rich visual contents with relatively low-cost, and using a single image to perform depth estimation has become one of the main focuses in resent research works. However, prior works usually rely on highly complicated computation and power-consuming GPU to achieve such task; therefore, we focus on developing a real-time light-weight system for depth prediction in this paper. Based on the well-known encoder-decoder architecture, we propose a supervised learning-based CNN with detachable decoders that produce depth predictions with different scales. We also formulate a novel log-depth loss function that computes the difference of predicted depth map and ground truth depth map in log space, so as to increase the prediction accuracy for nearby locations. To train our model efficiently, we generate depth map and semantic segmentation with complex teacher models. Via a series of ablation studies and experiments, it is validated that our model can efficiently performs real-time depth prediction with only 0.32M parameters, with the best trained model outperforms previous works on KITTI dataset for various evaluation matrices.

Scene Text Detection with Selected Anchors

Anna Zhu, Hang Du, Shengwu Xiong

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Auto-TLDR; AS-RPN: Anchor Selection-based Region Proposal Network for Scene Text Detection

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Object proposal technique with dense anchoring scheme for scene text detection were applied frequently to achieve high recall. It results in the significant improvement in accuracy but waste of computational searching, regression and classification. In this paper, we propose an anchor selection-based region proposal network (AS-RPN) using effective selected anchors instead of dense anchors to extract text proposals. The center, scales, aspect ratios and orientations of anchors are learnable instead of fixing, which leads to high recall and greatly reduced numbers of anchors. By replacing the anchor-based RPN in Faster RCNN, the AS-RPN-based Faster RCNN can achieve comparable performance with previous state-of-the-art text detecting approaches on standard benchmarks, including COCO-Text, ICDAR2013, ICDAR2015 and MSRA-TD500 when using single-scale and single model (ResNet50) testing only.

Improving Visual Relation Detection Using Depth Maps

Sahand Sharifzadeh, Sina Moayed Baharlou, Max Berrendorf, Rajat Koner, Volker Tresp

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Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Depth Maps for Visual Relation Detection

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State-of-the-art visual relation detection methods mostly rely on object information extracted from RGB images such as 2D bounding boxes, feature maps, and predicted class probabilities. Depth maps can additionally provide valuable information on object relations, e.g. helping to detect not only spatial relations, such as standing behind, but also non-spatial relations, such as holding. In this work, we study the effect of using different object information with a focus on depth maps. To enable this study, we release a new synthetic dataset of depth maps, VG-Depth, as an extension to Visual Genome (VG). We also note that given the highly imbalanced distribution of relations in VG, typical evaluation metrics for visual relation detection cannot reveal improvements of under-represented relations. To address this problem, we propose using an additional metric, calling it Macro Recall@K, and demonstrate its remarkable performance on VG. Finally, our experiments confirm that by effective utilization of depth maps within a simple, yet competitive framework, the performance of visual relation detection can be improved by a margin of up to 8%.

Hierarchical Head Design for Object Detectors

Shivang Agarwal, Frederic Jurie

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Auto-TLDR; Hierarchical Anchor for SSD Detector

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The notion of anchor plays a major role in modern detection algorithms such as the Faster-RCNN or the SSD detector. Anchors relate the features of the last layers of the detector with bounding boxes containing objects in images. Despite their importance, the literature on object detection has not paid real attention to them. The motivation of this paper comes from the observations that (i) each anchor learns to classify and regress candidate objects independently (ii) insufficient examples are available for each anchor in case of small-scale datasets. This paper addresses these questions by proposing a novel hierarchical head for the SSD detector. The new design has the added advantage of no extra weights, as compared to the original design at inference time, while improving detectors performance for small size training sets. Improved performance on PASCAL-VOC and state-of-the-art performance on FlickrLogos-47 validate the method. We also show when the proposed design does not give additional performance gain over the original design.

SyNet: An Ensemble Network for Object Detection in UAV Images

Berat Mert Albaba, Sedat Ozer

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Auto-TLDR; SyNet: Combining Multi-Stage and Single-Stage Object Detection for Aerial Images

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Recent advances in camera equipped drone applications and their widespread use increased the demand on vision based object detection algorithms for aerial images. Object detection process is inherently a challenging task as a generic computer vision problem, however, since the use of object detection algorithms on UAVs (or on drones) is relatively a new area, it remains as a more challenging problem to detect objects in aerial images. There are several reasons for that including: (i) the lack of large drone datasets including large object variance, (ii) the large orientation and scale variance in drone images when compared to the ground images, and (iii) the difference in texture and shape features between the ground and the aerial images. Deep learning based object detection algorithms can be classified under two main categories: (a) single-stage detectors and (b) multi-stage detectors. Both single-stage and multi-stage solutions have their advantages and disadvantages over each other. However, a technique to combine the good sides of each of those solutions could yield even a stronger solution than each of those solutions individually. In this paper, we propose an ensemble network, SyNet, that combines a multi-stage method with a single-stage one with the motivation of decreasing the high false negative rate of multi-stage detectors and increasing the quality of the single-stage detector proposals. As building blocks, CenterNet and Cascade R-CNN with pretrained feature extractors are utilized along with an ensembling strategy. We report the state of the art results obtained by our proposed solution on two different datasets: namely MS-COCO and visDrone with \%52.1 $mAP_{IoU = 0.75}$ is obtained on MS-COCO $val2017$ dataset and \%26.2 $mAP_{IoU = 0.75}$ is obtained on VisDrone $test-set$. Our code is available at: https://github.com/mertalbaba/SyNet}{https://github.com/mer talbaba/SyNet

Multiple-Step Sampling for Dense Object Detection and Counting

Zhaoli Deng, Yang Chenhui

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Auto-TLDR; Multiple-Step Sampling for Dense Objects Detection

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A multitude of similar or even identical objects are positioned closely in dense scenes, which brings about difficulties in object-detecting and object-counting. Since the poor performance of Faster R-CNN, recent works prefer to detect dense objects with the utilization of multi-layer feature maps. Nevertheless, they require complex post-processing to minimize overlap between adjacent bounding boxes, which reduce their detection speed. However, we find that such a multilayer prediction is not necessary. It is observed that there exists a waste of ground-truth boxes during sampling, causing the lack of positive samples and the final failure of Faster R-CNN training. Motivated by this observation we propose a multiple-step sampling method for anchor sampling. Our method reduces the waste of ground-truth boxes in three steps according to different rules. Besides, we balance the positive and negative samples, and samples at different quality. Our method improves base detector (Faster R-CNN), the detection tests on SKU-110K and CARPK benchmarks indicate that our approach offers a good trade-off between accuracy and speed.

Multi-Scale Residual Pyramid Attention Network for Monocular Depth Estimation

Jing Liu, Xiaona Zhang, Zhaoxin Li, Tianlu Mao

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-scale Residual Pyramid Attention Network for Monocular Depth Estimation

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Monocular depth estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision and is crucial for understanding 3D scene geometry. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) based methods have improved the estimation accuracy significantly. However, existing methods fail to consider complex textures and geometries in scenes, thereby resulting in loss of local details, distorted object boundaries, and blurry reconstruction. In this paper, we proposed an end-to-end Multi-scale Residual Pyramid Attention Network (MRPAN) to mitigate these problems.First,we propose a Multi-scale Attention Context Aggregation (MACA) module, which consists of Spatial Attention Module (SAM) and Global Attention Module (GAM). By considering the position and scale correlation of pixels from spatial and global perspectives, the proposed module can adaptively learn the similarity between pixels so as to obtain more global context information of the image and recover the complex structure in the scene. Then we proposed an improved Residual Refinement Module (RRM) to further refine the scene structure, giving rise to deeper semantic information and retain more local details. Experimental results show that our method achieves more promisin performance in object boundaries and local details compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

Forground-Guided Vehicle Perception Framework

Kun Tian, Tong Zhou, Shiming Xiang, Chunhong Pan

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Auto-TLDR; A foreground segmentation branch for vehicle detection

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As the basis of advanced visual tasks such as vehicle tracking and traffic flow analysis, vehicle detection needs to accurately predict the position and category of vehicle objects. In the past decade, deep learning based methods have made great progress. However, we also notice that some existing cases are not studied thoroughly. First, false positive on the background regions is one of the critical problems. Second, most of the previous approaches only optimize a single vehicle detection model, ignoring the relationship between different visual perception tasks. In response to the above two findings, we introduce a foreground segmentation branch for the first time, which can predict the pixel level of vehicles in advance. Furthermore, two attention modules are designed to guide the work of the detection branch. The proposed method can be easily grafted into the one-stage and two-stage detection framework. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model on LSVH, a dataset with large variations in vehicle scales, and achieve the state-of-the-art detection accuracy.

Learning a Dynamic High-Resolution Network for Multi-Scale Pedestrian Detection

Mengyuan Ding, Shanshan Zhang, Jian Yang

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Auto-TLDR; Learningable Dynamic HRNet for Pedestrian Detection

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Pedestrian detection is a canonical instance of object detection in computer vision. In practice, scale variation is one of the key challenges, resulting in unbalanced performance across different scales. Recently, the High-Resolution Network (HRNet) has become popular because high-resolution feature representations are more friendly to small objects. However, when we apply HRNet for pedestrian detection, we observe that it improves for small pedestrians on one hand, but hurts the performance for larger ones on the other hand. To overcome this problem, we propose a learnable Dynamic HRNet (DHRNet) aiming to generate different network paths adaptive to different scales. Specifically, we construct a parallel multi-branch architecture and add a soft conditional gate module allowing for dynamic feature fusion. Both branches share all the same parameters except the soft gate module. Experimental results on CityPersons and Caltech benchmarks indicate that our proposed dynamic HRNet is more capable of dealing with pedestrians of various scales, and thus improves the performance across different scales consistently.

Construction Worker Hardhat-Wearing Detection Based on an Improved BiFPN

Chenyang Zhang, Zhiqiang Tian, Jingyi Song, Yaoyue Zheng, Bo Xu

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Auto-TLDR; A One-Stage Object Detection Method for Hardhat-Wearing in Construction Site

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Work in the construction site is considered to be one of the occupations with the highest safety risk factor. Therefore, safety plays an important role in construction site. One of the most fundamental safety rules in construction site is to wear a hardhat. To strengthen the safety of the construction site, most of the current methods use multi-stage method for hardhat-wearing detection. These methods have limitations in terms of adaptability and generalizability. In this paper, we propose a one-stage object detection method based on convolutional neural network. We present a multi-scale strategy that selects the high-resolution feature maps of DarkNet-53 to effectively identify small-scale hardhats. In addition, we propose an improved weighted bi-directional feature pyramid network (BiFPN), which could fuse more semantic features from more scales. The proposed method can not only detect hardhat-wearing, but also identify the color of the hardhat. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a mAP of 87.04%, which outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on a public dataset.

SFPN: Semantic Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection

Yi Gan, Wei Xu, Jianbo Su

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Auto-TLDR; SFPN: Semantic Feature Pyramid Network to Address Information Dilution Issue in FPN

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Feature Pyramid Network(FPN) employs a top-down path to enhance low level feature by utilizing high level feature.However, further improvement of detector is greatly hindered by the inner defect of FPN. The dilution issue in FPN is analyzed in this paper, and a new architecture named Semantic Feature Pyramid Network(SFPN) is introduced to address the information imbalance problem caused by information dilution. The proposed method consists of two simple and effective components: Semantic Pyramid Module(SPM) and Semantic Feature Fusion Module(SFFM). To compensate for the weaknesses of FPN, the semantic segmentation result is utilized as an extra information source in our architecture.By constructing a semantic pyramid based on the segmentation result and fusing it with FPN, feature maps at each level can obtain the necessary information without suffering from the dilution issue. The proposed architecture could be applied on many detectors, and non-negligible improvement could be achieved. Although this method is designed for object detection, other tasks such as instance segmentation can also largely benefit from it. The proposed method brings Faster R-CNN and Mask R-CNN with ResNet-50 as backbone both 1.8 AP improvements respectively. Furthermore, SFPN improves Cascade R-CNN with backbone ResNet-101 from 42.4 AP to 43.5 AP.

MagnifierNet: Learning Efficient Small-Scale Pedestrian Detector towards Multiple Dense Regions

Qi Cheng, Mingqin Chen, Yingjie Wu, Fei Chen, Shiping Lin

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Auto-TLDR; MagnifierNet: A Simple but Effective Small-Scale Pedestrian Detection Towards Multiple Dense Regions

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Despite the success of pedestrian detection, there is still a significant gap in the performance of the detection of pedestrians at different scales. Detecting small-scale pedestrians is extremely challenging due to the low resolution of their convolution features which is essential for downstream classifiers. To address this issue, we observed pedestrian datasets and found that pedestrians often gather together in crowded public places. Then we propose MagnifierNet, a simple but effective small-scale pedestrian detector towards multiple dense regions. MagnifierNet uses our proposed sweep-line based grouping algorithm to find dense regions based on the number of pedestrians in the grouped region. And we adopt a new definition of small-scale pedestrians through grid search and KL-divergence. Besides, our grouping method can also be used as a new strategy for pedestrian data augmentation. The ablation study demonstrates that MagnifierNet improves the representation of small-scale pedestrians. We validate the effectiveness of MagnifierNet on CityPersons and KITTI datasets. Experimental results show that MagnifierNet achieves the best small-scale pedestrian detection performance on CityPersons benchmark without any external data, and also achieves competitive performance for detecting small-scale pedestrians on KITTI dataset without bells and whistles.

Extending Single Beam Lidar to Full Resolution by Fusing with Single Image Depth Estimation

Yawen Lu, Yuxing Wang, Devarth Parikh, Guoyu Lu

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Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised LIDAR for Low-Cost Depth Estimation

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Depth estimation is playing an important role in indoor and outdoor scene understanding, autonomous driving, augmented reality and many other tasks. Vehicles and robotics are able to use active illumination sensors such as LIDAR to receive high precision depth estimation. However, high-resolution Lidars are usually too expensive, which limits its massive production on various applications. Though single beam LIDAR enjoys the benefits of low cost, one beam depth sensing is not usually sufficient to perceive the surrounding environment in many scenarios. In this paper, we propose a learning-based framework to explore to replicate similar or even higher performance as costly LIDARs with our designed self-supervised network and a low-cost single-beam LIDAR. After the accurate calibration with a visible camera, the single beam LIDAR can adjust the scale uncertainty of the depth map estimated by the visible camera. The adjusted depth map enjoys the benefits of high resolution and sensing accuracy as high beam LIDAR and maintains low-cost as single beam LIDAR. Thus we can achieve similar sensing effect of high beam LIDAR with more than a 50-100 times cheaper price (e.g., \$80000 Velodyne HDL-64E LIDAR v.s. \$1000 SICK TIM-781 2D LIDAR and normal camera). The proposed approach is verified on our collected dataset and public dataset with superior depth-sensing performance.

Utilising Visual Attention Cues for Vehicle Detection and Tracking

Feiyan Hu, Venkatesh Gurram Munirathnam, Noel E O'Connor, Alan Smeaton, Suzanne Little

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Auto-TLDR; Visual Attention for Object Detection and Tracking in Driver-Assistance Systems

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Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) have been attracting attention from many researchers. Vision based sensors are the closest way to emulate human driver visual behavior while driving. In this paper, we explore possible ways to use visual attention (saliency) for object detection and tracking. We investigate: 1) How a visual attention map such as a subjectness attention or saliency map and an objectness attention map can facilitate region proposal generation in a 2-stage object detector; 2) How a visual attention map can be used for tracking multiple objects. We propose a neural network that can simultaneously detect objects as and generate objectness and subjectness maps to save computational power. We further exploit the visual attention map during tracking using a sequential Monte Carlo probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter. The experiments are conducted on KITTI and DETRAC datasets. The use of visual attention and hierarchical features has shown a considerable improvement of≈8% in object detection which effectively increased tracking performance by≈4% on KITTI dataset.

A Fast and Accurate Object Detector for Handwritten Digit String Recognition

Jun Guo, Wenjing Wei, Yifeng Ma, Cong Peng

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Auto-TLDR; ChipNet: An anchor-free object detector for handwritten digit string recognition

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Focusing on handwritten digit string recognition (HDSR), we propose an anchor-free object detector called ChipNet, where a novel encoding method is designed. The input image is divided into columns, and then these columns are encoded by the ground truth. The adjacent columns are responsible for detecting the same target so that it can well address the class-imbalanced problem meanwhile reducing the network computation. ChipNet is composed of convolutional and bidirectional long short term memory networks. Different from the typical detectors, it doesn't use region proposals, anchors or regions of interest pooling. Hence, it can overcome the shortages of anchor-based and dense detectors in HDSR. The experiments are implemented on the synthetic digit strings, the CVL HDS database, and the ORAND-CAR-A & B databases. The high accuracies, which surpass the reported results by a large margin (up to 6.62%), are achieved. Furthermore, it gets 219 FPS speed on 160*32 px resolution images when using a Tesla P100 GPU. The results also show that ChipNet can handle touching, connecting and arbitrary length digit strings, and the obtained accuracies in HDSR are as high as the ones in single handwritten digit recognition.

Foreground-Focused Domain Adaption for Object Detection

Yuchen Yang, Nilanjan Ray

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Unsupervised Object Detection

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Object detectors suffer from accuracy loss caused by domain shift from a source to a target domain. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approaches mitigate this loss by training with unlabeled target domain images. A popular processing pipeline applies adversarial training that aligns the distributions of the features from the two domains. We advocate that aligning the full image level features is not ideal for UDA object detection due to the presence of varied background areas during inference. Thus, we propose a novel foreground-focused domain adaptation (FFDA) framework which mines the loss of the domain discriminators to concentrate on the backpropagation of foreground loss. We obtain mining masks by collecting target predictions and source labels to outline foreground regions, and apply the masks to image and instance level domain discriminators to allow backpropagation only on the mined regions. By reinforcing this foreground-focused adaptation throughout multiple layers in the detector model, we gain a significant accuracy boost on the target domain prediction. Compared to previous works, our method reaches the new state-of-the-art accuracy on adapting Cityscape to Foggy Cityscape dataset and demonstrates competitive accuracy on other datasets that include various scenarios for autonomous driving applications.

CCA: Exploring the Possibility of Contextual Camouflage Attack on Object Detection

Shengnan Hu, Yang Zhang, Sumit Laha, Ankit Sharma, Hassan Foroosh

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Auto-TLDR; Contextual camouflage attack for object detection

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Deep neural network based object detection has become the cornerstone of many real-world applications. Along with this success comes concerns about its vulnerability to malicious attacks. To gain more insight into this issue, we propose a contextual camouflage attack (CCA for short) algorithm to influence the performance of object detectors. In this paper, we use an evolutionary search strategy and adversarial machine learning in interactions with a photo-realistic simulated environment to find camouflage patterns that are effective over a huge variety of object locations, camera poses, and lighting conditions. The proposed camouflages are validated effective to most of the state-of-the-art object detectors.

Enhanced Vote Network for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds

Min Zhong, Gang Zeng

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Auto-TLDR; A Vote Feature Enhancement Network for 3D Bounding Box Prediction

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In this work, we aim to estimate 3D bounding boxes by voting to object centers and then groups and aggregates the votes to generate 3D box proposals and semantic classes of objects. However, due to the sparse and unstructured nature of the point clouds, we face some challenges when directly predicting bounding box from the vote feature: the sparse vote feature may lack some necessary semantic and context information. To address the challenges, we propose a vote feature enhancement network that aims to encode semantic-aware information and aggravate global context for the vote feature. Specifically, we learn the point-wise semantic information and supplement it to the vote feature, and we also encode the pairwise relations to collect the global context. Experiments on two large datasets of real 3D scans, ScanNet and SUN RGB-D, demonstrate that our method can achieve excellent 3D detection results.

Vision-Based Layout Detection from Scientific Literature Using Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks

Huichen Yang, William Hsu

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Auto-TLDR; Transfer Learning for Scientific Literature Layout Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks

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We present an approach for adapting convolutional neural networks for object recognition and classification to scientific literature layout detection (SLLD), a shared subtask of several information extraction problems. Scientific publications contain multiple types of information sought by researchers in various disciplines, organized into an abstract, bibliography, and sections documenting related work, experimental methods, and results; however, there is no effective way to extract this information due to their diverse layout. In this paper, we present a novel approach to developing an end-to-end learning framework to segment and classify major regions of a scientific document. We consider scientific document layout analysis as an object detection task over digital images, without any additional text features that need to be added into the network during the training process. Our technical objective is to implement transfer learning via fine-tuning of pre-trained networks and thereby demonstrate that this deep learning architecture is suitable for tasks that lack very large document corpora for training. As part of the experimental test bed for empirical evaluation of this approach, we created a merged multi-corpus data set for scientific publication layout detection tasks. Our results show good improvement with fine-tuning of a pre-trained base network using this merged data set, compared to the baseline convolutional neural network architecture.

Hybrid Cascade Point Search Network for High Precision Bar Chart Component Detection

Junyu Luo, Jinpeng Wang, Chin-Yew Lin

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Auto-TLDR; Object Detection of Chart Components in Chart Images Using Point-based and Region-Based Object Detection Framework

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Charts are commonly used for data visualization. One common form of chart distribution is in its image form. To enable machine comprehension of chart images, precise detection of chart components in chart images is a critical step. Existing image object detection methods do not perform well in chart component detection which requires high boundary detection precision. And traditional rule-based approaches lack enough generalization ability. In order to address this problem, we design a novel two-stage object detection framework that combines point-based and region-based ideas, by simulating the process that human creating bounding boxes for objects. The experiment on our labeled ChartDet dataset shows our method greatly improves the performance of chart object detection. We further extend our method to a general object detection task and get comparable performance.

SynDHN: Multi-Object Fish Tracker Trained on Synthetic Underwater Videos

Mygel Andrei Martija, Prospero Naval

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Auto-TLDR; Underwater Multi-Object Tracking in the Wild with Deep Hungarian Network

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In this paper, we seek to extend multi-object tracking research on a relatively less explored domain, that of, underwater multi-object tracking in the wild. Multi-object fish tracking is an important task because it can provide fish monitoring systems with richer information (e.g. multiple views of the same fish) as compared to detections and it can be an invaluable input to fish behavior analysis. However, there is a lack of an annotated benchmark dataset with enough samples for this task. To circumvent the need for manual ground truth tracking annotation, we craft a synthetic dataset. Using this synthetic dataset, we train an integrated detector and tracker called SynDHN. SynDHN uses the Deep Hungarian Network (DHN), which is a differentiable approximation of the Hungarian assignment algorithm. We repurpose DHN to become the tracking component of our algorithm by performing the task of affinity estimation between detector predictions. We consider both spatial and appearance features for affinity estimation. Our results show that despite being trained on a synthetic dataset, SynDHN generalizes well to real underwater video tracking and performs better against our baseline algorithms.

PointDrop: Improving Object Detection from Sparse Point Clouds Via Adversarial Data Augmentation

Wenxin Ma, Jian Chen, Qing Du, Wei Jia

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Auto-TLDR; PointDrop: Improving Robust 3D Object Detection to Sparse Point Clouds

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Current 3D object detection methods achieve accurate and efficient results on the standard point cloud dataset. However, in real-world applications, due to the expensive cost of obtaining the annotated 3D object detection data, we expect to directly apply the model trained on the standard dataset to real-world scenarios. This strategy may fail because the point cloud samples obtained in the real-world scenarios may be much sparser due to various reasons (occlusion, low reflectivity of objects and fewer laser beams) and existing methods do not consider the limitations of their models on sparse point clouds. To improve the robustness of an object detector to sparser point clouds, we propose PointDrop, which learns to drop the features of some key points in the point clouds to generate challenging sparse samples for data augmentation. Moreover, PointDrop is able to adjust the difficulty of the generated samples based on the capacity of the detector and thus progressively improve the performance of the detector. We create two sparse point clouds datasets from the KITTI dataset to evaluate our method, and the experimental results show that PointDrop significantly improves the robustness of the detector to sparse point clouds.

Dynamic Guided Network for Monocular Depth Estimation

Xiaoxia Xing, Yinghao Cai, Yiping Yang, Dayong Wen

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Auto-TLDR; DGNet: Dynamic Guidance Upsampling for Self-attention-Decoding for Monocular Depth Estimation

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Self-attention or encoder-decoder structure has been widely used in deep neural networks for monocular depth estimation tasks. The former mechanism are capable to capture long-range information by computing the representation of each position by a weighted sum of the features at all positions, while the latter networks can capture structural details information by gradually recovering the spatial information. In this work, we combine the advantages of both methods. Specifically, our proposed model, DGNet, extends EMANet Network by adding an effective decoder module to refine the depth results. In the decoder stage, we further design dynamic guidance upsampling which uses local neighboring information of low-level features guide coarser depth to upsample. In this way, dynamic guidance upsampling generates content-dependent and spatially-variant kernels for depth upsampling which makes full use of spatial details information from low-level features. Experimental results demonstrate that our method obtains higher accuracy and generates the desired depth map.

Adaptive Word Embedding Module for Semantic Reasoning in Large-Scale Detection

Yu Zhang, Xiaoyu Wu, Ruolin Zhu

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Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Word Embedding Module for Object Detection

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In recent years, convolutional neural networks have achieved rapid development in the field of object detection. However, due to the imbalance of data, high costs in labor and uneven level of data labeling, the overall performance of the previous detection network has dropped sharply when dataset extended to the large-scale with hundreds and thousands categories. We present the Adaptive Word Embedding Module, extracting the adaptive semantic knowledge graph to reach semantic consistency within one image. Our method endows the ability to infer global semantic of detection networks without other attribute or relationship annotations. Compared with Faster RCNN, the algorithm on the MSCOCO dataset was significantly improved by 4.1%, and the mAP value has reached 32.8%. On the VG1000 dataset, it increased by 0.9% to 6.7% compared with Faster RCNN. Adaptive Word Embedding Module is lightweight, general-purpose and can be plugged into diverse detection networks. Code will be made available.

A Modified Single-Shot Multibox Detector for Beyond Real-Time Object Detection

Georgios Orfanidis, Konstantinos Ioannidis, Stefanos Vrochidis, Anastasios Tefas, Ioannis Kompatsiaris

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Auto-TLDR; Single Shot Detector in Resource-Restricted Systems with Lighter SSD Variations

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This works focuses on examining the performance of the Single Shot Detector (SSD) model in resource restricted systems where maintaining the power of the full model comprises a significant prerequisite. The proposed SSD variations examine the behavior of lighter versions of SSD while propose measures to limit the unavoidable performance shortage. The outcomes of the conducted research demonstrate a remarkable trade-off between performance losses, speed improvement and the required resource reservation. Thus, the experimental results evidence the efficiency of the presented SSD alterations towards accomplishing higher frame rates and retaining the performance of the original model.

CASNet: Common Attribute Support Network for Image Instance and Panoptic Segmentation

Xiaolong Liu, Yuqing Hou, Anbang Yao, Yurong Chen, Keqiang Li

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Auto-TLDR; Common Attribute Support Network for instance segmentation and panoptic segmentation

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Instance segmentation and panoptic segmentation is being paid more and more attention in recent years. In comparison with bounding box based object detection and semantic segmentation, instance segmentation can provide more analytical results at pixel level. Given the insight that pixels belonging to one instance have one or more common attributes of current instance, we bring up an one-stage instance segmentation network named Common Attribute Support Network (CASNet), which realizes instance segmentation by predicting and clustering common attributes. CASNet is designed in the manner of fully convolutional and can implement training and inference from end to end. And CASNet manages predicting the instance without overlaps and holes, which problem exists in most of current instance segmentation algorithms. Furthermore, it can be easily extended to panoptic segmentation through minor modifications with little computation overhead. CASNet builds a bridge between semantic and instance segmentation from finding pixel class ID to obtaining class and instance ID by operations on common attribute. Through experiment for instance and panoptic segmentation, CASNet gets mAP 32.8\% and PQ 59.0\% on Cityscapes validation dataset by joint training, and mAP 36.3\% and PQ 66.1\% by separated training mode. For panoptic segmentation, CASNet gets state-of-the-art performance on the Cityscapes validation dataset.

Small Object Detection by Generative and Discriminative Learning

Yi Gu, Jie Li, Chentao Wu, Weijia Jia, Jianping Chen

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Auto-TLDR; Generative and Discriminative Learning for Small Object Detection

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With the development of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the object detection accuracy has been greatly improved. But the performance of small object detection is still far from satisfactory, mainly because small objects are so tiny that the information contained in the feature map is limited. Existing methods focus on improving classification accuracy but still suffer from the limitation of bounding box prediction. To solve this issue, we propose a detection framework by generative and discriminative learning. First, a reconstruction generator network is designed to reconstruct the mapping from low frequency to high frequency for anchor box prediction. Then, a detector module extracts the regions of interest (ROIs) from generated results and implements a RoI-Head to predict object category and refine bounding box. In order to guide the reconstructed image related to the corresponding one, a discriminator module is adopted to tell from the generated result and the original image. Extensive evaluations on the challenging MS-COCO dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms most state-of-the-art models in detecting small objects, especially the reconstruction module improves the average precision for small object (APs) by 7.7%.

MixedFusion: 6D Object Pose Estimation from Decoupled RGB-Depth Features

Hangtao Feng, Lu Zhang, Xu Yang, Zhiyong Liu

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Auto-TLDR; MixedFusion: Combining Color and Point Clouds for 6D Pose Estimation

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Estimating the 6D pose of objects is an important process for intelligent systems to achieve interaction with the real-world. As the RGB-D sensors become more accessible, the fusion-based methods have prevailed, since the point clouds provide complementary geometric information with RGB values. However, Due to the difference in feature space between color image and depth image, the network structures that directly perform point-to-point matching fusion do not effectively fuse the features of the two. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective approach, named MixedFusion. Different from the prior works, we argue that the spatial correspondence of color and point clouds could be decoupled and reconnected, thus enabling a more flexible fusion scheme. By performing the proposed method, more informative points can be mixed and fused with rich color features. Extensive experiments are conducted on the challenging LineMod and YCB-Video datasets, show that our method significantly boosts the performance without introducing extra overheads. Furthermore, when the minimum tolerance of metric narrows, the proposed approach performs better for the high-precision demands.

CenterRepp: Predict Central Representative Point Set's Distribution for Detection

Yulin He, Limeng Zhang, Wei Chen, Xin Luo, Chen Li, Xiaogang Jia

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Auto-TLDR; CRPDet: CenterRepp Detector for Object Detection

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Object detection has long been an important issue in the discipline of scene understanding. Existing researches mainly focus on the object itself, ignoring its surrounding environment. In fact, the surrounding environment provides abundant information to help detectors classify and locate objects. This paper proposes CRPDet, viz. CenterRepp Detector, a framework for object detection. The main function of CRPDet is accomplished by the CenterRepp module, which takes into account the surrounding environment by predicting the distribution of the central representative points. CenterRepp converts labeled object frames into the mean and standard variance of the sampling points’ distribution. This helps increase the receptive field of objects, breaking the limitation of object frames. CenterRepp defines a position-fixed center point with significant weights, avoiding to sample all points in the surroundings. Experiments on the COCO test-dev detection benchmark demonstrates that our proposed CRPDet has comparable performance with state-of-the-art detectors, achieving 39.4 mAP with 51 FPS tested under single size input.

ScarfNet: Multi-Scale Features with Deeply Fused and Redistributed Semantics for Enhanced Object Detection

Jin Hyeok Yoo, Dongsuk Kum, Jun Won Choi

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Auto-TLDR; Semantic Fusion of Multi-scale Feature Maps for Object Detection

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Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have led us to achieve significant progress in object detection research. To detect objects of various sizes, object detectors often exploit the hierarchy of the multiscale feature maps called {\it feature pyramids}, which are readily obtained by the CNN architecture. However, the performance of these object detectors is limited because the bottom-level feature maps, which experience fewer convolutional layers, lack the semantic information needed to capture the characteristics of the small objects. To address such problems, various methods have been proposed to increase the depth for the bottom-level features used for object detection. While most approaches are based on the generation of additional features through the top-down pathway with lateral connections, our approach directly fuses multi-scale feature maps using bidirectional long short-term memory (biLSTM) in an effort to leverage the gating functions and parameter-sharing in generating deeply fused semantics. The resulting semantic information is redistributed to the individual pyramidal feature at each scale through the channel-wise attention model. We integrate our semantic combining and attentive redistribution feature network (ScarfNet) with the baseline object detectors, i.e., Faster R-CNN, single-shot multibox detector (SSD), and RetinaNet. Experimental results show that our method offers a significant performance gain over the baseline detectors and outperforms the competing multiscale fusion methods in the PASCAL VOC and COCO detection benchmarks.

Triplet-Path Dilated Network for Detection and Segmentation of General Pathological Images

Jiaqi Luo, Zhicheng Zhao, Fei Su, Limei Guo

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Auto-TLDR; Triplet-path Network for One-Stage Object Detection and Segmentation in Pathological Images

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Deep learning has been widely applied in the field of medical image processing. However, compared with flourishing visual tasks in natural images, the progress achieved in pathological images is not remarkable, and detection and segmentation, which are among basic tasks of computer vision, are regarded as two independent tasks. In this paper, we make full use of existing datasets and construct a triplet-path network using dilated convolutions to cooperatively accomplish one-stage object detection and nuclei segmentation for general pathological images. First, in order to meet the requirement of detection and segmentation, a novel structure called triplet feature generation (TFG) is designed to extract high-resolution and multiscale features, where features from different layers can be properly integrated. Second, considering that pathological datasets are usually small, a location-aware and partially truncated loss function is proposed to improve the classification accuracy of datasets with few images and widely varying targets. We compare the performance of both object detection and instance segmentation with state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed network on two datasets collected from multiple organs.

NetCalib: A Novel Approach for LiDAR-Camera Auto-Calibration Based on Deep Learning

Shan Wu, Amnir Hadachi, Damien Vivet, Yadu Prabhakar

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Auto-TLDR; Automatic Calibration of LiDAR and Cameras using Deep Neural Network

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A fusion of LiDAR and cameras have been widely used in many robotics applications such as classification, segmentation, object detection, and autonomous driving. It is essential that the LiDAR sensor can measure distances accurately, which is a good complement to the cameras. Hence, calibrating sensors before deployment is a mandatory step. The conventional methods include checkerboards, specific patterns, or human labeling, which is trivial and human-labor extensive if we do the same calibration process every time. The main propose of this research work is to build a deep neural network that is capable of automatically finding the geometric transformation between LiDAR and cameras. The results show that our model manages to find the transformations from randomly sampled artificial errors. Besides, our work is open-sourced for the community to fully utilize the advances of the methodology for developing more the approach, initiating collaboration, and innovation in the topic.

Bidirectional Matrix Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection

Wei Xu, Yi Gan, Jianbo Su

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Auto-TLDR; BMFPN: Bidirectional Matrix Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection

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Feature pyramids are widely used to improve scale invariance for object detection. Most methods just map the objects to feature maps with relevant square receptive fields, but rarely pay attention to the aspect ratio variation, which is also an important property of object instances. It will lead to a poor match between rectangular objects and assigned features with square receptive fields, thus preventing from accurate recognition and location. Besides, the information propagation among feature layers is sparse, namely, each feature in the pyramid may mainly or only contain single-level information, which is not representative enough for classification and localization sub-tasks. In this paper, Bidirectional Matrix Feature Pyramid Network (BMFPN) is proposed to address these issues. It consists of three modules: Diagonal Layer Generation Module (DLGM), Top-down Module (TDM) and Bottom-up Module (BUM). First, multi-level features extracted by backbone are fed into DLGM to produce the base features. Then these base features are utilized to construct the final feature pyramid through TDM and BUM in series. The receptive fields of the designed feature layers in BMFPN have various scales and aspect ratios. Objects can be correctly assigned to appropriate and representative feature maps with relevant receptive fields depending on its scale and aspect ratio properties. Moreover, TDM and BUM form bidirectional and reticular information flow, which effectively fuses multi level information in top-down and bottom-up manner respectively. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed architecture, an end-toend anchor-free detector is designed and trained by integrating BMFPN into FCOS. And the center ness branch in FCOS is modified with our Gaussian center-ness branch (GCB), which brings another slight improvement. Without bells and whistles, our method gains +3.3%, +2.4% and +2.6% AP on MS COCO dataset from baselines with ResNet-50, ResNet-101 and ResNeXt-101 backbones, respectively.

Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images

Jinwang Wang, Wen Yang, Haowen Guo, Ruixiang Zhang, Gui-Song Xia

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Auto-TLDR; Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images Using Multiple Center Points Based Learning Network

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Object detection in Earth Vision has achieved great progress in recent years. However, tiny object detection in aerial images remains a very challenging problem since the tiny objects contain a small number of pixels and are easily confused with the background. To advance tiny object detection research in aerial images, we present a new dataset for Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images (AI-TOD). Specifically, AI-TOD comes with 700,621 object instances for eight categories across 28,036 aerial images. Compared to existing object detection datasets in aerial images, the mean size of objects in AI-TOD is about 12.8 pixels, which is much smaller than others. To build a benchmark for tiny object detection in aerial images, we evaluate the state-of-the-art object detectors on our AI-TOD dataset. Experimental results show that direct application of these approaches on AI-TOD produces suboptimal object detection results, thus new specialized detectors for tiny object detection need to be designed. Therefore, we propose a multiple center points based learning network (M-CenterNet) to improve the localization performance of tiny object detection, and experimental results show the significant performance gain over the competitors.

A Novel Region of Interest Extraction Layer for Instance Segmentation

Leonardo Rossi, Akbar Karimi, Andrea Prati

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Auto-TLDR; Generic RoI Extractor for Two-Stage Neural Network for Instance Segmentation

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Given the wide diffusion of deep neural network architectures for computer vision tasks, several new applications are nowadays more and more feasible. Among them, a particular attention has been recently given to instance segmentation, by exploiting the results achievable by two-stage networks (such as Mask R-CNN or Faster R-CNN), derived from R-CNN. In these complex architectures, a crucial role is played by the Region of Interest (RoI) extraction layer, devoted to extract a coherent subset of features from a single Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) layer attached on top of a backbone. This paper is motivated by the need to overcome to the limitations of existing RoI extractors which select only one (the best) layer from FPN. Our intuition is that all the layers of FPN retain useful information. Therefore, the proposed layer (called Generic RoI Extractor - GRoIE) introduces non-local building blocks and attention mechanisms to boost the performance. A comprehensive ablation study at component level is conducted to find the best set of algorithms and parameters for the GRoIE layer. Moreover, GRoIE can be integrated seamlessly with every two-stage architecture for both object detection and instance segmentation tasks. Therefore, the improvements brought by the use of GRoIE in different state-of-the-art architectures are also evaluated. The proposed layer leads up to gain a 1.1% AP on bounding box detection and 1.7% AP on instance segmentation. The code is publicly available on GitHub repository at https://github.com/IMPLabUniPr/mmdetection-groie

NAS-EOD: An End-To-End Neural Architecture Search Method for Efficient Object Detection

Huigang Zhang, Liuan Wang, Jun Sun, Li Sun, Hiromichi Kobashi, Nobutaka Imamura

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Auto-TLDR; NAS-EOD: Neural Architecture Search for Object Detection on Edge Devices

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Model efficiency for object detection has become more and more important recently, especially when intelligent mobile devices are more and more convenient and developed today. Current small models for this task is either extended from the models for classification task, or pruned directly on the basis of large models. These pipelines are not task-specific or data-oriented so that their performance are not good enough for users. In this work, we propose a neural architecture search (NAS) method to build a detection model automatically that can perform well on edge devices. Specifically, the proposed method supports the search of not only multi-scale feature network, but also backbone network. This enables us to search out a global optimal model. To the best of our knowledge, it is a first attempt for searching an overall detection model via NAS. Additionally, we add latency information into the main objective during performance estimation, so that the search process can find a final model suitable for edge devices. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC benchmark indicate that the searched model (named NAS-EOD) can get good accuracy even without ImageNet pre-training. When using ImageNet pre-training, our model is superior to state-of-the-art small object detection models.

Detective: An Attentive Recurrent Model for Sparse Object Detection

Amine Kechaou, Manuel Martinez, Monica Haurilet, Rainer Stiefelhagen

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Auto-TLDR; Detective: An attentive object detector that identifies objects in images in a sequential manner

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In this work, we present Detective – an attentive object detector that identifies objects in images in a sequential manner. Our network is based on an encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder is a convolutional neural network, and the decoder is a convolutional recurrent neural network coupled with an attention mechanism. At each iteration, our decoder focuses on the relevant parts of the image using an attention mechanism, and then estimates the object’s class and the bounding box coordinates. Current object detection models generate dense predictions and rely on post-processing to remove duplicate predictions. Detective is a sparse object detector that generates a single bounding box per object instance. However, training a sparse object detector is challenging, as it requires the model to reason at the instance level and not just at the class and spatial levels. We propose a training mechanism based on the Hungarian Algorithm and a loss that balances the localization and classification tasks. This allows Detective to achieve promising results on the PASCAL VOC object detection dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that sparse object detection is possible and has a great potential for future developments in applications where the order of the objects to be predicted is of interest.

Iterative Bounding Box Annotation for Object Detection

Bishwo Adhikari, Heikki Juhani Huttunen

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-Automatic Bounding Box Annotation for Object Detection in Digital Images

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Manual annotation of bounding boxes for object detection in digital images is tedious, and time and resource consuming. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic method for efficient bounding box annotation. The method trains the object detector iteratively on small batches of labeled images and learns to propose bounding boxes for the next batch, after which the human annotator only needs to correct possible errors. We propose an experimental setup for simulating the human actions and use it for comparing different iteration strategies, such as the order in which the data is presented to the annotator. We experiment on our method with three datasets and show that it can reduce the human annotation effort significantly, saving up to 75% of total manual annotation work.

Correlation-Based ConvNet for Small Object Detection in Videos

Brais Bosquet, Manuel Mucientes, Victor Brea

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Auto-TLDR; STDnet-ST: An End-to-End Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Neural Network for Small Object Detection in Video

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The detection of small objects is of particular interest in many real applications. In this paper, we propose STDnet-ST, a novel approach to small object detection in video using spatial information operating alongside temporal video information. STDnet-ST is an end-to-end spatio-temporal convolutional neural network that detects small objects over time and correlates pairs of the top-ranked regions with the highest likelihood of containing small objects. This architecture links the small objects across the time as tubelets, being able to dismiss unprofitable object links in order to provide high-quality tubelets. STDnet-ST achieves state-of-the-art results for small objects on the publicly available USC-GRAD-STDdb and UAVDT video datasets.

Multi-View Object Detection Using Epipolar Constraints within Cluttered X-Ray Security Imagery

Brian Kostadinov Shalon Isaac-Medina, Chris G. Willcocks, Toby Breckon

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Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Epipolar Constraints for Multi-View Object Detection in X-ray Security Images

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Automatic detection for threat object items is an increasing emerging area of future application in X-ray security imagery. Although modern X-ray security scanners can provide two or more views, the integration of such object detectors across the views has not been widely explored with rigour. Therefore, we investigate the application of geometric constraints using the epipolar nature of multi-view imagery to improve object detection performance. Furthermore, we assume that images come from uncalibrated views, such that a method to estimate the fundamental matrix using ground truth bounding box centroids from multiple view object detection labels is proposed. In addition, detections are given a score based on its similarity with respect to the distribution of the error of the epipolar estimation. This score is used as confidence weights for merging duplicated predictions using non-maximum suppression. Using a standard object detector (YOLOv3), our technique increases the average precision of detection by 2.8% on a dataset composed of firearms, laptops, knives and cameras. These results indicate that the integration of images at different views significantly improves the detection performance of threat items of cluttered X-ray security images.

FeatureNMS: Non-Maximum Suppression by Learning Feature Embeddings

Niels Ole Salscheider

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Auto-TLDR; FeatureNMS: Non-Maximum Suppression for Multiple Object Detection

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Most state of the art object detectors output multiple detections per object. The duplicates are removed in a post-processing step called Non-Maximum Suppression. Classical Non-Maximum Suppression has shortcomings in scenes that contain objects with high overlap: The idea of this heuristic is that a high bounding box overlap corresponds to a high probability of having a duplicate. We propose FeatureNMS to solve this problem. FeatureNMS recognizes duplicates not only based on the intersection over union between bounding boxes, but also based on the difference of feature vectors. These feature vectors can encode more information like visual appearance. Our approach outperforms classical NMS and derived approaches and achieves state of the art performance.

Siamese Dynamic Mask Estimation Network for Fast Video Object Segmentation

Dexiang Hong, Guorong Li, Kai Xu, Li Su, Qingming Huang

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Auto-TLDR; Siamese Dynamic Mask Estimation for Video Object Segmentation

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Video object segmentation(VOS) has been a fundamental topic in recent years, and many deep learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. However, most of these methods rely on pixel-level matching between the template and the searched frames on the whole image while the targets only occupy a small region. Calculating on the entire image brings lots of additional computation cost. Besides, the whole image may contain some distracting information resulting in many false-positive matching points. To address this issue, motivated by one-stage instance object segmentation methods, we propose an efficient siamese dynamic mask estimation network for fast video object segmentation. The VOS is decoupled into two tasks, i.e. mask feature learning and dynamic kernel prediction. The former is responsible for learning high-quality features to preserve structural geometric information, and the latter learns a dynamic kernel which is used to convolve with the mask feature to generate a mask output. We use Siamese neural network as a feature extractor and directly predict masks after correlation. In this way, we can avoid using pixel-level matching, making our framework more simple and efficient. Experiment results on DAVIS 2016 /2017 datasets show that our proposed methods can run at 35 frames per second on NVIDIA RTX TITAN while preserving competitive accuracy.

P2D: A Self-Supervised Method for Depth Estimation from Polarimetry

Marc Blanchon, Desire Sidibe, Olivier Morel, Ralph Seulin, Daniel Braun, Fabrice Meriaudeau

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Auto-TLDR; Polarimetric Regularization for Monocular Depth Estimation

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Monocular depth estimation is a recurring subject in the field of computer vision. Its ability to describe scenes via a depth map while reducing the constraints related to the formulation of perspective geometry tends to favor its use. However, despite the constant improvement of algorithms, most methods exploit only colorimetric information. Consequently, robustness to events to which the modality is not sensitive to, like specularity or transparency, is neglected. In response to this phenomenon, we propose using polarimetry as an input for a self-supervised monodepth network. Therefore, we propose exploiting polarization cues to encourage accurate reconstruction of scenes. Furthermore, we include a term of polarimetric regularization to state-of-the-art method to take specific advantage of the data. Our method is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrating that the contribution of this new information as well as an enhanced loss function improves depth estimation results, especially for specular areas.

Dynamic Low-Light Image Enhancement for Object Detection Via End-To-End Training

Haifeng Guo, Yirui Wu, Tong Lu

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Auto-TLDR; Object Detection using Low-Light Image Enhancement for End-to-End Training

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Object detection based on convolutional neural networks is a hot research topic in computer vision. The illumination component in the image has a great impact on object detection, and it will cause a sharp decline in detection performance under low-light conditions. Using low-light image enhancement technique as a pre-processing mechanism can improve image quality and obtain better detection results.However, due to the complexity of low-light environments, the existing enhancement methods may have negative effects on some samples. Therefore, it is difficult to improve the overall detection performance in low-light conditions. In this paper, our goal is to use image enhancement to improve object detection performance rather than perceptual quality for humans. We propose a novel framework that combines low-light enhancement and object detection for end-to-end training. The framework can dynamically select different enhancement subnetworks for each sample to improve the performance of the detector. Our proposed method consists of two stage: the enhancement stage and the detection stage. The enhancement stage dynamically enhances the low-light images under the supervision of several enhancement methods and output corresponding weights. During the detection stage, the weights offers information on object classification to generate high-quality region proposals and in turn result in accurate detection. Our experiments present promising results, which show that the proposed method can significantly improve the detection performance in low-light environment.

Partially Supervised Multi-Task Network for Single-View Dietary Assessment

Ya Lu, Thomai Stathopoulou, Stavroula Mougiakakou

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Auto-TLDR; Food Volume Estimation from a Single Food Image via Geometric Understanding and Semantic Prediction

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Food volume estimation is an essential step in the pipeline of dietary assessment and demands the precise depth estimation of the food surface and table plane. Existing methods based on computer vision require either multi-image input or additional depth maps, reducing convenience of implementation and practical significance. Despite the recent advances in unsupervised depth estimation from a single image, the achieved performance in the case of large texture-less areas needs to be improved. In this paper, we propose a network architecture that jointly performs geometric understanding (i.e., depth prediction and 3D plane estimation) and semantic prediction on a single food image, enabling a robust and accurate food volume estimation regardless of the texture characteristics of the target plane. For the training of the network, only monocular videos with semantic ground truth are required, while the depth map and 3D plane ground truth are no longer needed. Experimental results on two separate food image databases demonstrate that our method performs robustly on texture-less scenarios and is superior to unsupervised networks and structure from motion based approaches, while it achieves comparable performance to fully-supervised methods.