A Boundary-Aware Distillation Network for Compressed Video Semantic Segmentation

Hongchao Lu

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Auto-TLDR; A Boundary-Aware Distillation Network for Video Semantic Segmentation

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In recent years optical flow is often estimated to reuse features so as to accelerate video semantic segmentation. With addition of optical flow network, however, extra cost may incur and accuracy may thus be degraded because of repeated warping operation. In this paper, we propose a boundary-aware distillation network (BDNet) that replaces optical flow network with block motion vectors encoded in compressed video, resulting in negligible computational complexity. In order to make salient features, an auxiliary boundary-aware stream is added to the main stream to jointly estimate silhouette and segmentation of objects. To further correct warped features, a well-trained teacher network is employed to transfer knowledge to the main stream. Both boundary-aware stream and the teacher network are neglected during inference stage, so that video segmentation network enables to get faster without increasing any computational burden. By splitting the task into three components, our BDNet shows almost 10% time saving as well as 1.6% accuracy improvement over baseline on the Cityscapes dataset.

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Auto-TLDR; Gated Scale-Transfer Operation for Semantic Segmentation

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Boundary-Aware Graph Convolution for Semantic Segmentation

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Auto-TLDR; Boundary-Aware Graph Convolution for Semantic Segmentation

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Recent works have made great progress in semantic segmentation by exploiting contextual information in a local or global manner with dilated convolutions, pyramid pooling or self-attention mechanism. However, few works have focused on harvesting boundary information to improve the segmentation performance. In order to enhance the feature similarity within the object and keep discrimination from other objects, we propose a boundary-aware graph convolution (BGC) module to propagate features within the object. The graph reasoning is performed among pixels of the same object apart from the boundary pixels. Based on the proposed BGC module, we further introduce the Boundary-aware Graph Convolution Network(BGCNet), which consists of two main components including a basic segmentation network and the BGC module, forming a coarse-to-fine paradigm. Specifically, the BGC module takes the coarse segmentation feature map as node features and boundary prediction to guide graph construction. After graph convolution, the reasoned feature and the input feature are fused together to get the refined feature, producing the refined segmentation result. We conduct extensive experiments on three popular semantic segmentation benchmarks including Cityscapes, PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO Stuff, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on all three benchmarks.

FastSal: A Computationally Efficient Network for Visual Saliency Prediction

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Auto-TLDR; MobileNetV2: A Convolutional Neural Network for Saliency Prediction

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Auto-TLDR; GLANet: Global-Local Attention Network for Semantic Segmentation

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Auto-TLDR; Transitional Asymmetric Non-Local Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation on Dirt Roads

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Fida Mohammad Thoker, Cees Snoek

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Auto-TLDR; Cross-Modal Action Recognition and Detection in Non-RGB Video Modalities by Learning from Large-Scale Labeled RGB Data

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Semantic Segmentation Refinement Using Entropy and Boundary-guided Monte Carlo Sampling and Directed Regional Search

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Auto-TLDR; Directed Region Search and Refinement for Semantic Segmentation

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Semantic segmentation requires both large receptive field and accurate spatial information. Despite existing methods based on fully convolutional network have greatly improved the accuracy, the prediction results still do not show satisfactory on small objects and boundary regions. We propose a refinement algorithm to improve the result generated by front network. Our method takes a modified U-shape network to generate both of segmentation mask and semantic boundary, which are used as inputs of refinement algorithm. We creatively introduce information entropy to represent the confidence of the neural network's prediction corresponding to each pixel. The information entropy combined with the semantic boundary can capture those unpredictable pixels with low-confidence through Monte Carlo sampling. Each selected pixel will be used as initial seeds for directed region search and refinement. Our purpose is to search the neighbor high-confidence regions according to the initial seeds. The re-labeling approach is based on high-confidence results. Particularly, different from general region growing methods, our method adopts a directed region search strategy based on gradient descent to find the high-confidence region effectively. Our method improves the performance both on Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC datasets. In the evaluation of segmentation accuracy of some small objects, our method surpasses most of state of the art methods.

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Auto-TLDR; A Dual Context Network for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation

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Auto-TLDR; Distilled Learning Framework for Siamese Tracking

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Auto-TLDR; EFPN: Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network for Semantic Segmentation

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Knowledge Distillation with a Precise Teacher and Prediction with Abstention

Xu Yi, Jian Pu, Hui Zhao

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Auto-TLDR; Knowledge Distillation using Deep gambler loss and selective classification framework

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Knowledge distillation, which aims to train model under the supervision from another large model (teacher model) to the original model (student model), has achieved remarkable results in supervised learning. However, there are two major problems with existing knowledge distillation methods. One is the teacher's supervision is sometimes misleading, and the other is the student's prediction is not accurate enough. To address the first issue, instead of learning a combination of both teachers and ground truth, we apply knowledge adjustment to correct teachers' supervision using ground truth. For the second problem, we use the selective classification framework to train the student model. In particular, the deep gambler loss is adopted to predict with reservation by explicitly introducing the $(m+1)$-th class. We consider two settings of knowledge distillation: (1) distillation across different network structures ({\it AlexNet, ResNet}), and (2) distillation across networks with different depths ({\it ResNet18, ResNet50}) to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. The experimental results on benchmark datasets (i.e., {\it Fashion-MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR10, CIFAR100}) are reported with higher prediction accuracies and lower coverage errors.

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.

Video Semantic Segmentation Using Deep Multi-View Representation Learning

Akrem Sellami, Salvatore Tabbone

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Auto-TLDR; Deep Multi-view Representation Learning for Video Object Segmentation

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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.

PSDNet: A Balanced Architecture of Accuracy and Parameters for Semantic Segmentation

Yue Liu, Zhichao Lian

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Auto-TLDR; Pyramid Pooling Module with SE1Cblock and D2SUpsample Network (PSDNet)

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Abstract—In this paper, we present our Pyramid Pooling Module （PPM） with SE1Cblock and D2SUpsample Network (PSDNet), a novel architecture for accurate semantic segmentation. Started from the known work called Pyramid Scene Parsing Network (PSPNet), PSDNet takes advantage of pyramid pooling structure with channel attention module and feature transform module in Pyramid Pooling Module (PPM). The enhanced PPM with these two components can strengthen context information flowing in the network instead of damaging it. The channel attention module we mentioned is an improved “Squeeze and Excitation with 1D Convolution” (SE1C) block which can explicitly model interrelationship between channels with fewer number of parameters. We propose a feature transform module named “Depth to Space Upsampling” (D2SUpsample) in the PPM which keeps integrity of features by transforming features while interpolating features, at the same time reducing parameters. In addition, we introduce a joint strategy in SE1Cblock which combines two variants of global pooling without increasing parameters. Compared with PSPNet, our work achieves higher accuracy on public datasets with 73.97% mIoU and 82.89% mAcc accuracy on Cityscapes Dataset based on ResNet50 backbone.

ACCLVOS: Atrous Convolution with Spatial-Temporal ConvLSTM for Video Object Segmentation

Muzhou Xu, Shan Zong, Chunping Liu, Shengrong Gong, Zhaohui Wang, Yu Xia

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation using U-shape Convolution and ConvLSTM

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Semi-supervised video object segmentation aims at segmenting the target of interest throughout a video sequence when only the annotated mask of the first frame is given. A feasible method for segmentation is to capture the spatial-temporal coherence between frames. However, it may suffer from mask drift when the spatial-temporal coherence is unreliable. To relieve this problem, we propose an encoder-decoder-recurrent model for semi-supervised video object segmentation. The model adopts a U-shape architecture that combines atrous convolution and ConvLSTM to establish the coherence in both the spatial and temporal domains. Furthermore, the weight ratio for each block is also reconstructed to make the model more suitable for the VOS task. We evaluate our method on two benchmarks, DAVIS-2017 and Youtube-VOS, where state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy with a real-time inference speed of 21.3 frames per second on a Tesla P100 is obtained.

Automatic Student Network Search for Knowledge Distillation

Zhexi Zhang, Wei Zhu, Junchi Yan, Peng Gao, Guotong Xie

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Auto-TLDR; NAS-KD: Knowledge Distillation for BERT

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Pre-trained language models (PLMs), such as BERT, have achieved outstanding performance on multiple natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, such pre-trained models usually contain a huge number of parameters and are computationally expensive. The high resource demand hinders their application on resource-restricted devices like mobile phones. Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective compression approach, aiming at encouraging a light-weight student network to imitate the teacher network, and accordingly latent knowledge is transferred from the teacher to student. However, the great majority of student networks in previous KD methods are manually designed, normally a subnetwork of the teacher network. Transformer is generally utilized as the student for compressing BERT but still contains masses of parameters. Motivated by this, we propose a novel approach named NAS-KD, which automatically generates an optimal student network using neural architecture search (NAS) to enhance the distillation for BERT. Experiment on 7 classification tasks in NLP domain demonstrates that NAS-KD can substantially reduce the size of BERT without much performance sacrifice.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Multiple Domain Discriminators and Adaptive Self-Training

Teo Spadotto, Marco Toldo, Umberto Michieli, Pietro Zanuttigh

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes

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Joint Semantic-Instance Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds: Instance Separation and Semantic Fusion

Min Zhong, Gang Zeng

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Auto-TLDR; Joint Semantic Segmentation and Instance Separation of 3D Point Clouds

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Feature Fusion for Online Mutual Knowledge Distillation

Jangho Kim, Minsung Hyun, Inseop Chung, Nojun Kwak

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Auto-TLDR; Feature Fusion Learning Using Fusion of Sub-Networks

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We propose a learning framework named Feature Fusion Learning (FFL) that efficiently trains a powerful classifier through a fusion module which combines the feature maps generated from parallel neural networks and generates meaningful feature maps. Specifically, we train a number of parallel neural networks as sub-networks, then we combine the feature maps from each sub-network using a fusion module to create a more meaningful feature map. The fused feature map is passed into the fused classifier for overall classification. Unlike existing feature fusion methods, in our framework, an ensemble of sub-network classifiers transfers its knowledge to the fused classifier and then the fused classifier delivers its knowledge back to each sub-network, mutually teaching one another in an online-knowledge distillation manner. This mutually teaching system not only improves the performance of the fused classifier but also obtains performance gain in each sub-network. Moreover, our model is more beneficial than other alternative methods because different types of network can be used for each sub-network. We have performed a variety of experiments on multiple datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet and proved that our method is more effective than other alternative methods in terms of performances of both sub-networks and the fused classifier, and the aspect of generating meaningful feature maps.

Do Not Treat Boundaries and Regions Differently: An Example on Heart Left Atrial Segmentation

Zhou Zhao, Elodie Puybareau, Nicolas Boutry, Thierry Geraud

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Auto-TLDR; Attention Full Convolutional Network for Atrial Segmentation using ResNet-101 Architecture

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Atrial fibrillation is the most common heart rhythm disease. Due to a lack of understanding in matter of underlying atrial structures, current treatments are still not satisfying. Recently, with the popularity of deep learning, many segmentation methods based on fully convolutional networks have been proposed to analyze atrial structures, especially from late gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging. However, two problems still occur: 1) segmentation results include the atrial-like background; 2) boundaries are very hard to segment. Most segmentation approaches design a specific network that mainly focuses on the regions, to the detriment of the boundaries. Therefore, this paper proposes an attention full convolutional network framework based on the ResNet-101 architecture, which focuses on boundaries as much as on regions. The additional attention module is added to have the network pay more attention on regions and then to reduce the impact of the misleading similarity of neighboring tissues. We also use a hybrid loss composed of a region loss and a boundary loss to treat boundaries and regions at the same time. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach on the MICCAI 2018 Atrial Segmentation Challenge public dataset.

Learning Object Deformation and Motion Adaption for Semi-Supervised Video Object Segmentation

Xiaoyang Zheng, Xin Tan, Jianming Guo, Lizhuang Ma

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation with Mask-propagation-based Model

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We propose a novel method to solve the task of semi-supervised video object segmentation in this paper, where the mask annotation is only given at the first frame of the video sequence. A mask-propagation-based model is applied to learn the past and current information for segmentation. Besides, due to the scarcity of training data, image/mask pairs that model object deformation and shape variance are generated for the training phase. In addition, we generate the key flips between two adjacent frames for motion adaptation. The method works in an end-to-end way, without any online fine-tuning on test videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art algorithms on benchmark datasets, covering cases with single object or multiple objects. We also conduct extensive ablation experiments to analyze the effectiveness of our proposed method.

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.

Object Segmentation Tracking from Generic Video Cues

Amirhossein Kardoost, Sabine Müller, Joachim Weickert, Margret Keuper

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Auto-TLDR; A Light-Weight Variational Framework for Video Object Segmentation in Videos

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We propose a light-weight variational framework for online tracking of object segmentations in videos based on optical flow and image boundaries. While high-end computer vision methods on this task rely on sequence specific training of dedicated CNN architectures, we show the potential of a variational model, based on generic video information from motion and color. Such cues are usually required for tasks such as robot navigation or grasp estimation. We leverage them directly for video object segmentation and thus provide accurate segmentations at potentially very low extra cost. Our simple method can provide competitive results compared to the costly CNN-based methods with parameter tuning. Furthermore, we show that our approach can be combined with state-of-the-art CNN-based segmentations in order to improve over their respective results. We evaluate our method on the datasets DAVIS 16,17 and SegTrack v2.

Fast and Accurate Real-Time Semantic Segmentation with Dilated Asymmetric Convolutions

Leonel Rosas-Arias, Gibran Benitez-Garcia, Jose Portillo-Portillo, Gabriel Sanchez-Perez, Keiji Yanai

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Auto-TLDR; FASSD-Net: Dilated Asymmetric Pyramidal Fusion for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation

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Recent works have shown promising results applied to real-time semantic segmentation tasks. To maintain fast inference speed, most of the existing networks make use of light decoders, or they simply do not use them at all. This strategy helps to maintain a fast inference speed; however, their accuracy performance is significantly lower in comparison to non-real-time semantic segmentation networks. In this paper, we introduce two key modules aimed to design a high-performance decoder for real-time semantic segmentation for reducing the accuracy gap between real-time and non-real-time segmentation networks. Our first module, Dilated Asymmetric Pyramidal Fusion (DAPF), is designed to substantially increase the receptive field on the top of the last stage of the encoder, obtaining richer contextual features. Our second module, Multi-resolution Dilated Asymmetric (MDA) module, fuses and refines detail and contextual information from multi-scale feature maps coming from early and deeper stages of the network. Both modules exploit contextual information without excessively increasing the computational complexity by using asymmetric convolutions. Our proposed network entitled “FASSD-Net” reaches 78.8% of mIoU accuracy on the Cityscapes validation dataset at 41.1 FPS on full resolution images (1024x2048). Besides, with a light version of our network, we reach 74.1% of mIoU at 133.1 FPS (full resolution) on a single NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti card with no additional acceleration techniques. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/GibranBenitez/FASSD-Net.

Teacher-Student Training and Triplet Loss for Facial Expression Recognition under Occlusion

Mariana-Iuliana Georgescu, Radu Ionescu

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Auto-TLDR; Knowledge Distillation for Facial Expression Recognition under Occlusion

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In this paper, we study the task of facial expression recognition under strong occlusion. We are particularly interested in cases where 50% of the face is occluded, e.g. when the subject wears a Virtual Reality (VR) headset. While previous studies show that pre-training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on fully-visible (non-occluded) faces improves the accuracy, we propose to employ knowledge distillation to achieve further improvements. First of all, we employ the classic teacher-student training strategy, in which the teacher is a CNN trained on fully-visible faces and the student is a CNN trained on occluded faces. Second of all, we propose a new approach for knowledge distillation based on triplet loss. During training, the goal is to reduce the distance between an anchor embedding, produced by a student CNN that takes occluded faces as input, and a positive embedding (from the same class as the anchor), produced by a teacher CNN trained on fully-visible faces, so that it becomes smaller than the distance between the anchor and a negative embedding (from a different class than the anchor), produced by the student CNN. Third of all, we propose to combine the distilled embeddings obtained through the classic teacher-student strategy and our novel teacher-student strategy based on triplet loss into a single embedding vector. We conduct experiments on two benchmarks, FER+ and AffectNet, with two CNN architectures, VGG-f and VGG-face, showing that knowledge distillation can bring significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods designed for occluded faces in the VR setting. Furthermore, we obtain accuracy rates that are quite close to the state-of-the-art models that take as input fully-visible faces. For example, on the FER+ data set, our VGG-face based on concatenated distilled embeddings attains an accuracy rate of 82.75% on lower-half-visible faces, which is only 2.24% below the accuracy rate of a state-of-the-art VGG-13 that is evaluated on fully-visible faces. Given that our model sees only the lower-half of the face, we consider this to be a remarkable achievement. In conclusion, we consider that our distilled CNN models can provide useful feedback for the task of recognizing the facial expressions of a person wearing a VR headset.

Towards Low-Bit Quantization of Deep Neural Networks with Limited Data

Yong Yuan, Chen Chen, Xiyuan Hu, Silong Peng

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Auto-TLDR; Low-Precision Quantization of Deep Neural Networks with Limited Data

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Recent machine learning methods use increasingly large deep neural networks to achieve state-of-the-art results in various tasks. Network quantization can effectively reduce computation and memory costs without modifying network structures, facilitating the deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) on cloud and edge devices. However, most of the existing methods usually need time-consuming training or fine-tuning and access to the original training dataset that may be unavailable due to privacy or security concerns. In this paper, we present a novel method to achieve low-precision quantization of deep neural networks with limited data. Firstly, to reduce the complexity of per-channel quantization and the degeneration of per-layer quantization, we introduce group-wise quantization which separates the output channels into groups that each group is quantized separately. Secondly, to better distill knowledge from the pre-trained FP32 model with limited data, we introduce a two-stage knowledge distillation method that divides the optimization process into independent optimization stage and joint optimization stage to address the limitation of layer-wise supervision and global supervision. Extensive experiments on ImageNet2012 (ResNet18/50, ShuffleNetV2, and MobileNetV2) demonstrate that the proposed approach can significantly improve the quantization model's accuracy when only a few training samples are available. We further show that the method also extends to other computer vision architectures and tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation.

Compact CNN Structure Learning by Knowledge Distillation

Waqar Ahmed, Andrea Zunino, Pietro Morerio, Vittorio Murino

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Auto-TLDR; Knowledge Distillation for Compressing Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

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The concept of compressing deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is essential to use limited computation, power, and memory resources on embedded devices. However, existing methods achieve this objective at the cost of a drop in inference accuracy in computer vision tasks. To address such a drawback, we propose a framework that leverages knowledge distillation along with customizable block-wise optimization to learn a lightweight CNN structure while preserving better control over the compression-performance tradeoff. Considering specific resource constraints, e.g., floating-point operations per second (FLOPs) or model-parameters, our method results in a state of the art network compression while being capable of achieving better inference accuracy. In a comprehensive evaluation, we demonstrate that our method is effective, robust, and consistent with results over a variety of network architectures and datasets, at negligible training overhead. In particular, for the already compact network MobileNet_v2, our method offers up to 2x and 5.2x better model compression in terms of FLOPs and model-parameters, respectively, while getting 1.05% better model performance than the baseline network.

Temporal Feature Enhancement Network with External Memory for Object Detection in Surveillance Video

Masato Fujitake, Akihiro Sugimoto

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Auto-TLDR; Temporal Attention Based External Memory Network for Surveillance Object Detection

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Video object detection is challenging and essential in practical applications, such as surveillance cameras for traffic control and public security. Unlike the video in natural scenes, the surveillance video tends to contain dense, and small objects (typically vehicles) in their appearances. Therefore, existing methods for surveillance object detection utilize still-image object detection approaches with rich feature extractors at the expense of their run-time speeds. The run-time speed, however, becomes essential when the video is being streamed. In this paper, we exploit temporal information in videos to enrich the feature maps, proposing the first temporal attention based external memory network for the live stream of video. Extensive experiments on real-world traffic surveillance benchmarks demonstrate the real-time performance of the proposed model while keeping comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art.

Towards Practical Compressed Video Action Recognition: A Temporal Enhanced Multi-Stream Network

Bing Li, Longteng Kong, Dongming Zhang, Xiuguo Bao, Di Huang, Yunhong Wang

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Auto-TLDR; TEMSN: Temporal Enhanced Multi-Stream Network for Compressed Video Action Recognition

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Current compressed video action recognition methods are mainly based on completely received compressed videos. However, in real transmission, the compressed video packets are usually disorderly received and lost due to network jitters or congestion. It is of great significance to recognize actions in early phases with limited packets, e.g. forecasting the potential risks from videos quickly. In this paper, we proposed a Temporal Enhanced Multi-Stream Network (TEMSN) for practical compressed video action recognition. First, we use three compressed modalities as complementary cues and build a multi-stream network to capture the rich information from compressed video packets. Second, we design a temporal enhanced module based on Encoder-Decoder structure applied on each stream to infer the missing packets, and generate more complete action dynamics. Thanks to the rich modalities and temporal enhancement, our approach is able to better modeling the action with limited compressed packets. Experiments on HMDB-51 and UCF-101 dataset validate its effectiveness and efficiency.

Distilling Spikes: Knowledge Distillation in Spiking Neural Networks

Ravi Kumar Kushawaha, Saurabh Kumar, Biplab Banerjee, Rajbabu Velmurugan

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Auto-TLDR; Knowledge Distillation in Spiking Neural Networks for Image Classification

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Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) are energy-efficient computing architectures that exchange spikes for processing information, unlike classical Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). Due to this, SNNs are better suited for real-life deployments. However, similar to ANNs, SNNs also benefit from deeper architectures to obtain improved performance. Furthermore, like the deep ANNs, the memory, compute and power requirements of SNNs also increase with model size, and model compression becomes a necessity. Knowledge distillation is a model com- pression technique that enables transferring the learning of a large machine learning model to a smaller model with minimal loss in performance. In this paper, we propose techniques for knowledge distillation in spiking neural networks for the task of image classification. We present ways to distill spikes from a larger SNN, also called the teacher network, to a smaller one, also called the student network, while minimally impacting the classification accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with detailed experiments on three standard datasets while proposing novel distillation methodologies and loss functions. We also present a multi-stage knowledge distillation technique for SNNs using an intermediate network to obtain higher performance from the student network. Our approach is expected to open up new avenues for deploying high performing large SNN models on resource-constrained hardware platforms.

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.

Channel Planting for Deep Neural Networks Using Knowledge Distillation

Kakeru Mitsuno, Yuichiro Nomura, Takio Kurita

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Auto-TLDR; Incremental Training for Deep Neural Networks with Knowledge Distillation

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In recent years, deeper and wider neural networks have shown excellent performance in computer vision tasks, while their enormous amount of parameters results in increased computational cost and overfitting. Several methods have been proposed to compress the size of the networks without reducing network performance. Network pruning can reduce redundant and unnecessary parameters from a network. Knowledge distillation can transfer the knowledge of deeper and wider networks to smaller networks. The performance of the smaller network obtained by these methods is bounded by the predefined network. Neural architecture search has been proposed, which can search automatically the architecture of the networks to break the structure limitation. Also, there is a dynamic configuration method to train networks incrementally as sub-networks. In this paper, we present a novel incremental training algorithm for deep neural networks called planting. Our planting can search the optimal network architecture with smaller number of parameters for improving the network performance by augmenting channels incrementally to layers of the initial networks while keeping the earlier trained parameters fixed. Also, we propose using the knowledge distillation method for training the channels planted. By transferring the knowledge of deeper and wider networks, we can grow the networks effectively and efficiently. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on different datasets such as CIFAR-10/100 and STL-10. For the STL-10 dataset, we show that we are able to achieve comparable performance with only 7% parameters compared to the larger network and reduce the overfitting caused by a small amount of the data.

A Fine-Grained Dataset and Its Efficient Semantic Segmentation for Unstructured Driving Scenarios

Kai Andreas Metzger, Peter Mortimer, Hans J "Joe" Wuensche

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Auto-TLDR; TAS500: A Semantic Segmentation Dataset for Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Environments

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Research in autonomous driving for unstructured environments suffers from a lack of semantically labeled datasets compared to its urban counterpart. Urban and unstructured outdoor environments are challenging due to the varying lighting and weather conditions during a day and across seasons. In this paper, we introduce TAS500, a novel semantic segmentation dataset for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. TAS500 offers fine-grained vegetation and terrain classes to learn drivable surfaces and natural obstacles in outdoor scenes effectively. We evaluate the performance of modern semantic segmentation models with an additional focus on their efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of fine-grained semantic classes to improve the overall prediction accuracy, especially along the class boundaries. The dataset, code, and pretrained model are available online.

Motion U-Net: Multi-Cue Encoder-Decoder Network for Motion Segmentation

Gani Rahmon, Filiz Bunyak, Kannappan Palaniappan

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Auto-TLDR; Motion U-Net: A Deep Learning Framework for Robust Moving Object Detection under Challenging Conditions

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Detection of moving objects is a critical first step in many computer vision applications. Several algorithms for motion and change detection were proposed. However, many of these approaches lack the ability to handle challenging real-world scenarios. Recently, deep learning approaches started to produce impressive solutions to computer vision tasks, particularly for detection and segmentation. Many existing deep learning networks proposed for moving object detection rely only on spatial appearance cues. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-cue and multi-stream network, Motion U-Net (MU-Net), which integrates motion, change, and appearance cues using a deep learning framework for robust moving object detection under challenging conditions. The proposed network consists of a two-stream encoder module followed by feature concatenation and a decoder module. Motion and change cues are computed through our tensor-based motion estimation and a multi-modal background subtraction modules. The proposed system was tested and evaluated on the change detection challenge datasets (CDnet-2014) and compared to state-of-the-art methods. On CDnet-2014 dataset, our approach reaches an average overall F-measure of 0.9852 and outperforms all current state-of-the-art methods. The network was also tested on the unseen SBI-2015 dataset and produced promising results.

Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes Via Multi-Level Feature Alignment

Bin Zhang, Shengjie Zhao, Rongqing Zhang

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Auto-TLDR; Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation Using Generative Adversarial Networks

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Semantic segmentation is an essential task in plenty of real-life applications such as virtual reality, video analysis, autonomous driving, etc. Recent advancements in fundamental vision-based tasks ranging from image classification to semantic segmentation have demonstrated deep learning-based models' high capability in learning complicated representation on large datasets. Nevertheless, manually labeling semantic segmentation dataset with pixel-level annotation is extremely labor-intensive. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-level feature alignment framework for cross-domain semantic segmentation of urban scenes by exploiting generative adversarial networks. In the proposed multi-level feature alignment method, we first translate images from one domain to another one. Then the discriminative feature representations extracted by the deep neural network are concatenated, followed by domain adversarial learning to make the intermediate feature distribution of the target domain images close to those in the source domain. With these domain adaptation techniques, models trained with images in the source domain where the labels are easy to acquire can be deployed to the target domain where the labels are scarce. Experimental evaluations on various mainstream benchmarks confirm the effectiveness as well as robustness of our approach.

MFI: Multi-Range Feature Interchange for Video Action Recognition

Sikai Bai, Qi Wang, Xuelong Li

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-range Feature Interchange Network for Action Recognition in Videos

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Short-range motion features and long-range dependencies are two complementary and vital cues for action recognition in videos, but it remains unclear how to efficiently and effectively extract these two features. In this paper, we propose a novel network to capture these two features in a unified 2D framework. Specifically, we first construct a Short-range Temporal Interchange (STI) block, which contains a Channels-wise Temporal Interchange (CTI) module for encoding short-range motion features. Then a Graph-based Regional Interchange (GRI) module is built to present long-range dependencies using graph convolution. Finally, we replace original bottleneck blocks in the ResNet with STI blocks and insert several GRI modules between STI blocks, to form a Multi-range Feature Interchange (MFI) Network. Practically, extensive experiments are conducted on three action recognition datasets (i.e., Something-Something V1, HMDB51, and UCF101), which demonstrate that the proposed MFI network achieves impressive results with very limited computing cost.

Enhancing Semantic Segmentation of Aerial Images with Inhibitory Neurons

Ihsan Ullah, Sean Reilly, Michael Madden

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Auto-TLDR; Lateral Inhibition in Deep Neural Networks for Object Recognition and Semantic Segmentation

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In a Convolutional Neural Network, each neuron in the output feature map takes input from the neurons in its receptive field. This receptive field concept plays a vital role in today's deep neural networks. However, inspired by neuro-biological research, it has been proposed to add inhibitory neurons outside the receptive field, which may enhance the performance of neural network models. In this paper, we begin with deep network architectures such as VGG and ResNet, and propose an approach to add lateral inhibition in each output neuron to reduce its impact on its neighbours, both in fine-tuning pre-trained models and training from scratch. Our experiments show that notable improvements upon prior baseline deep models can be achieved. A key feature of our approach is that it is easy to add to baseline models; it can be adopted in any model containing convolution layers, and we demonstrate its value in applications including object recognition and semantic segmentation of aerial images, where we show state-of-the-art result on the Aeroscape dataset. On semantic segmentation tasks, our enhancement shows 17.43% higher mIoU than a single baseline model on a single source (the Aeroscape dataset), 13.43% higher performance than an ensemble model on the same single source, and 7.03% higher than an ensemble model on multiple sources (segmentation datasets). Our experiments illustrate the potential impact of using inhibitory neurons in deep learning models, and they also show better results than the baseline models that have standard convolutional layer.

Multi-Order Feature Statistical Model for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization

Qingtao Wang, Ke Zhang, Shaoli Huang, Lianbo Zhang, Jin Fan

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-Order Feature Statistical Method for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization

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Fine-grained visual categorization aims to learn a robust image representation modeling subtle differences from similar categories. Existing methods in this field tackle the problem by designing complex frameworks, which produce high-level features by performing first-order or second-order pooling. Despite the impressive performance achieved by these strategies, the single-order networks only carry linear or non-linear information of the last convolutional layer, neglecting the fact that feature from different orders are mutually complementary. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Order Feature Statistical Method (MOFS), which learns fine-grained features characterizing multiple orders. Specifically, the MOFS consists of two sub-modules: (i) a first-order module modeling both mid-level and high-level features. (ii) a covariance feature statistical module capturing high-order features. By deploying these two sub-modules on the top of existing backbone networks, MOFS simultaneously captures multi-level of discrimative patters including local, global and co-related patters. We evaluate the proposed method on three challenging benchmarks, namely CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars, and FGVC-Aircraft. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, experiments results exhibit superior performance in recognizing fine-grained objects

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.

Multi-Direction Convolution for Semantic Segmentation

Dehui Li, Zhiguo Cao, Ke Xian, Xinyuan Qi, Chao Zhang, Hao Lu

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-Direction Convolution for Contextual Segmentation

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Context is known to be one of crucial factors effecting the performance improvement of semantic segmentation. However, state-of-the-art segmentation models built upon fully convolutional networks are inherently weak in encoding contextual information because of stacked local operations such as convolution and pooling. Failing to capture context leads to inferior segmentation performance. Despite many context modules have been proposed to relieve this problem, they still operate in a local manner or use the same contextual information in different positions (due to upsampling). In this paper, we introduce the idea of Multi-Direction Convolution (MDC)—a novel operator capable of encoding rich contextual information. This operator is inspired by an observation that the standard convolution only slides along the spatial dimension (x, y direction) where the channel dimension (z direction) is fixed, which renders slow growth of the receptive field (RF). If considering the channel-fixed convolution to be one-direction, MDC is multi-direction in the sense that MDC slides along both spatial and channel dimensions, i.e., it slides along x, y when z is fixed, along x, z when y is fixed, and along y, z when x is fixed. In this way, MDC is able to encode rich contextual information with the fast increase of the RF. Compared to existing context modules, the encoded context is position-sensitive because no upsampling is required. MDC is also efficient and easy to implement. It can be implemented with few standard convolution layers with permutation. We show through extensive experiments that MDC effectively and selectively enlarges the RF and outperforms existing contextual modules on two standard benchmarks, including Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC2012.

Knowledge Distillation Beyond Model Compression

Fahad Sarfraz, Elahe Arani, Bahram Zonooz

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Auto-TLDR; Knowledge Distillation from Teacher to Student

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Knowledge distillation (KD) is commonly deemed as an effective model compression technique in which a compact model (student) is trained under the supervision of a larger pretrained model or an ensemble of models (teacher). Various techniques have been proposed since the original formulation, which mimics different aspects of the teacher such as the representation space, decision boundary or intra-data relationship. Some methods replace the one way knowledge distillation from a static teacher with collaborative learning between a cohort of students. Despite the recent advances, a clear understanding of where knowledge resides in a deep neural network and optimal method for capturing knowledge from teacher and transferring it to student still remains an open question. In this study we provide an extensive study on 9 different knowledge distillation methods which covers a broad spectrum of approaches to capture and transfer knowledge. We demonstrate the versatility of the KD framework on different datasets and network architectures under varying capacity gaps between the teacher and student. The study provides intuition for the effects of mimicking different aspects of the teacher and derives insights from the performance of the different distillation approaches to guide the the design of more effective KD methods . Furthermore, our study shows the effectiveness of the KD framework in learning efficiently under varying severity levels of label noise and class imbalance, consistently providing significant generalization gains over standard training. We emphasize that the efficacy of KD goes much beyond a model compression technique and should be considered as a general purpose training paradigm which offers more robustness to common challenges in the real-world datasets compared to the standard training procedure.

Human Segmentation with Dynamic LiDAR Data

Tao Zhong, Wonjik Kim, Masayuki Tanaka, Masatoshi Okutomi

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Auto-TLDR; Spatiotemporal Neural Network for Human Segmentation with Dynamic Point Clouds

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Consecutive LiDAR scans and depth images compose dynamic 3D sequences, which contain more abundant spatiotemporal information than a single frame. Similar to the development history of image and video perception, dynamic 3D sequence perception starts to come into sight after inspiring research on static 3D data perception. This work proposes a spatiotemporal neural network for human segmentation with the dynamic LiDAR point clouds. It takes a sequence of depth images as input. It has a two-branch structure, i.e., the spatial segmentation branch and the temporal velocity estimation branch. The velocity estimation branch is designed to capture motion cues from the input sequence and then propagates them to the other branch. So that the segmentation branch segments humans according to both spatial and temporal features. These two branches are jointly learned on a generated dynamic point cloud data set for human recognition. Our works fill in the blank of dynamic point cloud perception with the spherical representation of point cloud and achieves high accuracy. The experiments indicate that the introduction of temporal feature benefits the segmentation of dynamic point cloud perception.

Efficient Online Subclass Knowledge Distillation for Image Classification

Maria Tzelepi, Nikolaos Passalis, Anastasios Tefas

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Auto-TLDR; OSKD: Online Subclass Knowledge Distillation

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Deploying state-of-the-art deep learning models on embedded systems dictates certain storage and computation limitations. During the recent few years Knowledge Distillation (KD) has been recognized as a prominent approach to address this issue. That is, KD has been effectively proposed for training fast and compact deep learning models by transferring knowledge from more complex and powerful models. However, knowledge distillation, in its conventional form, involves multiple stages of training, rendering it a computationally and memory demanding procedure. In this paper, a novel single-stage self knowledge distillation method is proposed, namely Online Subclass Knowledge Distillation (OSKD), that aims at revealing the similarities inside classes, improving the performance of any deep neural model in an online manner. Hence, as opposed to existing online distillation methods, we are able to acquire further knowledge from the model itself, without building multiple identical models or using multiple models to teach each other, rendering the OSKD approach more efficient. The experimental evaluation on two datasets validates that the proposed method improves the classification performance.

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.

Two-Stage Adaptive Object Scene Flow Using Hybrid CNN-CRF Model

Congcong Li, Haoyu Ma, Qingmin Liao

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Auto-TLDR; Adaptive object scene flow estimation using a hybrid CNN-CRF model and adaptive iteration

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Scene flow estimation based on stereo sequences is a comprehensive task relevant to disparity and optical flow. Some existing methods are time-consuming and often fail in the presence of reflective surfaces. In this paper, we propose a two-stage adaptive object scene flow estimation method using a hybrid CNN-CRF model (ACOSF), which benefits from high-quality features and the structured modelling capability. Meanwhile, in order to balance the computational efficiency and accuracy, we employ adaptive iteration for energy function optimization, which is flexible and efficient for various scenes. Besides, we utilize high-quality pixel selection to reduce the computation time with only a slight decrease in accuracy. Our method achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art, which ranks second on the challenging KITTI 2015 scene flow benchmark.

CAggNet: Crossing Aggregation Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Xu Cao, Yanghao Lin

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Auto-TLDR; Crossing Aggregation Network for Medical Image Segmentation

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In this paper, we present Crossing Aggregation Network (CAggNet), a novel densely connected semantic segmentation method for medical image analysis. The crossing aggregation network absorbs the idea of deep layer aggregation and makes significant innovations in layer connection and semantic information fusion. In this architecture, the traditional skip-connection structure of general U-Net is replaced by aggregations of multi-level down-sampling and up-sampling layers. This enables the network to fuse information interactively flows at different levels of layers in semantic segmentation. It also introduces weighted aggregation module to aggregate multi-scale output information. We have evaluated and compared our CAggNet with several advanced U-Net based methods in two public medical image datasets, including the 2018 Data Science Bowl nuclei detection dataset and the 2015 MICCAI gland segmentation competition dataset. Experimental results indicate that CAggNet improves medical object recognition and achieves a more accurate and efficient segmentation compared to existing improved U-Net and UNet++ structure.

FOANet: A Focus of Attention Network with Application to Myocardium Segmentation

Zhou Zhao, Elodie Puybareau, Nicolas Boutry, Thierry Geraud

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Auto-TLDR; FOANet: A Hybrid Loss Function for Myocardium Segmentation of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Images

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In myocardium segmentation of cardiac magnetic resonance images, ambiguities often appear near the boundaries of the target domains due to tissue similarities. To address this issue, we propose a new architecture, called FOANet, which can be decomposed in three main steps: a localization step, a Gaussian-based contrast enhancement step, and a segmentation step. This architecture is supplied with a hybrid loss function that guides the FOANet to study the transformation relationship between the input image and the corresponding label in a threelevel hierarchy (pixel-, patch- and map-level), which is helpful to improve segmentation and recovery of the boundaries. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on two public datasets in terms of regional and boundary segmentations.