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.

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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.

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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Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims at improving the generalization capability of a model trained on a source domain to perform well on a target domain for which no labeled data is available. In this paper, we consider the semantic segmentation of urban scenes and we propose an approach to adapt a deep neural network trained on synthetic data to real scenes addressing the domain shift between the two different data distributions. We introduce a novel UDA framework where a standard supervised loss on labeled synthetic data is supported by an adversarial module and a self-training strategy aiming at aligning the two domain distributions. The adversarial module is driven by a couple of fully convolutional discriminators dealing with different domains: the first discriminates between ground truth and generated maps, while the second between segmentation maps coming from synthetic or real world data. The self-training module exploits the confidence estimated by the discriminators on unlabeled data to select the regions used to reinforce the learning process. Furthermore, the confidence is thresholded with an adaptive mechanism based on the per-class overall confidence. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in adapting a segmentation network trained on synthetic datasets like GTA5 and SYNTHIA, to real world datasets like Cityscapes and Mapillary.

Manual-Label Free 3D Detection Via an Open-Source Simulator

Zhen Yang, Chi Zhang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Huiming Guo

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Auto-TLDR; DA-VoxelNet: A Novel Domain Adaptive VoxelNet for LIDAR-based 3D Object Detection

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LiDAR based 3D object detectors typically need a large amount of detailed-labeled point cloud data for training, but these detailed labels are commonly expensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose a manual-label free 3D detection algorithm that leverages the CARLA simulator to generate a large amount of self-labeled training samples and introduces a novel Domain Adaptive VoxelNet (DA-VoxelNet) that can cross the distribution gap from the synthetic data to the real scenario. The self-labeled training samples are generated by a set of high quality 3D models embedded in a CARLA simulator and a proposed LiDAR-guided sampling algorithm. Then a DA-VoxelNet that integrates both a sample-level DA module and an anchor-level DA module is proposed to enable the detector trained by the synthetic data to adapt to real scenario. Experimental results show that the proposed unsupervised DA 3D detector on KITTI evaluation set can achieve 76.66% and 56.64% mAP on BEV mode and 3D mode respectively. The results reveal a promising perspective of training a LIDAR-based 3D detector without any hand-tagged label.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Object Detection in Cultural Sites

Giovanni Pasqualino, Antonino Furnari, Giovanni Maria Farinella

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Object Detection in Cultural Sites

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The ability to detect objects in cultural sites from the egocentric point of view of the user can enable interesting applications for both the visitors and the manager of the site. Unfortunately, current object detection algorithms have to be trained on large amounts of labeled data, the collection of which is costly and time-consuming. While synthetic data generated from the 3D model of the cultural site can be used to train object detection algorithms, a significant drop in performance is generally observed when such algorithms are deployed to work with real images. In this paper, we consider the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for object detection in cultural sites. Specifically, we assume the availability of synthetic labeled images and real unlabeled images for training. To study the problem, we propose a dataset containing 75244 synthetic and 2190 real images with annotations for 16 different artworks. We hence investigate different domain adaptation techniques based on image-to-image translation and feature alignment. Our analysis points out that such techniques can be useful to address the domain adaptation issue, while there is still plenty of space for improvement on the proposed dataset. We release the dataset at our web page to encourage research on this challenging topic: https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/EGO-CH-OBJ-ADAPT/.

Shape Consistent 2D Keypoint Estimation under Domain Shift

Levi Vasconcelos, Massimiliano Mancini, Davide Boscaini, Barbara Caputo, Elisa Ricci

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Auto-TLDR; Deep Adaptation for Keypoint Prediction under Domain Shift

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Recent unsupervised domain adaptation methods based on deep architectures have shown remarkable performance not only in traditional classification tasks but also in more complex problems involving structured predictions (e.g. semantic segmentation, depth estimation). Following this trend, in this paper we present a novel deep adaptation framework for estimating keypoints under \textit{domain shift}, i.e. when the training (\textit{source}) and the test (\textit{target}) images significantly differ in terms of visual appearance. Our method seamlessly combines three different components: feature alignment, adversarial training and self-supervision. Specifically, our deep architecture leverages from domain-specific distribution alignment layers to perform target adaptation at the feature level. Furthermore, a novel loss is proposed which combines an adversarial term for ensuring aligned predictions in the output space and a geometric consistency term which guarantees coherent predictions between a target sample and its perturbed version. Our extensive experimental evaluation conducted on three publicly available benchmarks shows that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods in the 2D keypoint prediction task.

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%.

Teacher-Student Competition for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Ruixin Xiao, Zhilei Liu, Baoyuan Wu

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaption with Teacher-Student Competition

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With the supervision from source domain only in class-level, existing unsupervised domain adaption (UDA) methods mainly learn the domain-invariant representations from a shared feature extractor, which cause the source-bias problem. This paper proposes an unsupervised domain adaption approach with Teacher-Student Competition (TSC). In particular, a student network is introduced to learn the target-specific feature space, and we design a novel competition mechanism to select more credible pseudo-labels for the training of student network. We introduce a teacher network with the structure of existing conventional UDA method, and both teacher and student networks compete to provide target pseudo-labels to constrain every target sample's training in student network. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed TSC framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art domain adaption methods on Office-31 and ImageCLEF-DA benchmarks.

Class Conditional Alignment for Partial Domain Adaptation

Mohsen Kheirandishfard, Fariba Zohrizadeh, Farhad Kamangar

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-class Adversarial Adaptation for Partial Domain Adaptation

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Adversarial adaptation models have demonstrated significant progress towards transferring knowledge from a labeled source dataset to an unlabeled target dataset. Partial domain adaptation (PDA) investigates the scenarios in which the source domain is large and diverse, and the target label space is a subset of the source label space. The main purpose of PDA is to identify the shared classes between the domains and promote learning transferable knowledge from these classes. In this paper, we propose a multi-class adversarial architecture for PDA. The proposed approach jointly aligns the marginal and class-conditional distributions in the shared label space by minimaxing a novel multi-class adversarial loss function. Furthermore, we incorporate effective regularization terms to encourage selecting the most relevant subset of source domain classes. In the absence of target labels, the proposed approach is able to effectively learn domain-invariant feature representations, which in turn can enhance the classification performance in the target domain. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets Office-$31$, Office-Home, and Caltech-Office corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in addressing different partial transfer learning tasks.

Energy-Constrained Self-Training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Xiaofeng Liu, Xiongchang Liu, Bo Hu, Jun Lu, Jonghye Woo, Jane You

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Energy Function Minimization

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Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer the knowledge on a labeled source domain distribution to perform well on an unlabeled target domain. Recently, the deep self-training involves an iterative process of predicting on the target domain and then taking the confident predictions as hard pseudo-labels for retraining. However, the pseudo-labels are usually unreliable, and easily leading to deviated solutions with propagated errors. In this paper, we resort to the energy-based model and constrain the training of the unlabeled target sample with the energy function minimization objective. It can be applied as a simple additional regularization. In this framework, it is possible to gain the benefits of the energy-based model, while retaining strong discriminative performance following a plug-and-play fashion. The convergence property and its connection with classification expectation minimization are investigated. We deliver extensive experiments on the most popular and large scale UDA benchmarks of image classification as well as semantic segmentation to demonstrate its generality and effectiveness.

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.

Unsupervised Multi-Task Domain Adaptation

Shih-Min Yang, Mei-Chen Yeh

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Multi-task Learning for Image Recognition

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With abundant labeled data, deep convolutional neural networks have shown great success in various image recognition tasks. However, these models are often less powerful when applied to novel datasets due to a phenomenon known as domain shift. Unsupervised domain adaptation methods aim to address this problem, allowing deep models trained on the labeled source domain to be used on a different target domain (without labels). In this paper, we investigate whether the generalization ability of an unsupervised domain adaptation method can be improved through multi-task learning, with learned features required to be both domain invariant and discriminative for multiple different but relevant tasks. Experiments evaluating two fundamental recognition tasks---including image recognition and segmentation--- show that the generalization ability empowered by multi-task learning may not benefit recognition when the model is directly applied on the target domain, but the multi-task setting can boost the performance of state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation methods by a non-negligible margin.

Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation Via Selective Pseudo Labeling and Progressive Self-Training

Yoonhyung Kim, Changick Kim

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation with Pseudo Labels

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Domain adaptation (DA) is a representation learning methodology that transfers knowledge from a label-sufficient source domain to a label-scarce target domain. While most of early methods are focused on unsupervised DA (UDA), several studies on semi-supervised DA (SSDA) are recently suggested. In SSDA, a small number of labeled target images are given for training, and the effectiveness of those data is demonstrated by the previous studies. However, the previous SSDA approaches solely adopt those data for embedding ordinary supervised losses, overlooking the potential usefulness of the few yet informative clues. Based on this observation, in this paper, we propose a novel method that further exploits the labeled target images for SSDA. Specifically, we utilize labeled target images to selectively generate pseudo labels for unlabeled target images. In addition, based on the observation that pseudo labels are inevitably noisy, we apply a label noise-robust learning scheme, which progressively updates the network and the set of pseudo labels by turns. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms other previous state-of-the-art SSDA methods.

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.

Which Airline Is This? Airline Logo Detection in Real-World Weather Conditions

Christian Wilms, Rafael Heid, Mohammad Araf Sadeghi, Andreas Ribbrock, Simone Frintrop

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Auto-TLDR; Airlines logo detection on airplane tails using data augmentation

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The detection of logos in images, for instance, logos of airlines on airplane tails, is a difficult task in real-world weather conditions. Most systems used for logo detection are very good at detecting logos in clean images. However, they exhibit problems when images are degraded by effects of adverse weather conditions as they frequently occur in real-world scenarios. For investigating this problem on airline logo detection as a sub-problem of logo detection, we first present a new dataset for airline logo detection on airplane tails containing a test split with images degraded by adverse weather effects. Second, to handle the detection of airline logos effectively, a new two-stage airline logo detection system based on a state-of-the-art object proposal generation system and a specifically tailored classifier is proposed. Finally, improving the results on images degraded by adverse weather effects, we introduce a learning-free application-agnostic data augmentation strategy simulating effects like rain and fog. The results show the superior performance of our airline logo detection system compared to state-of-the-art. Furthermore, applying our data augmentation approach to a variety of systems, reduces the significant drop in performance on degraded images.

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.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Person Re-Identification through Source-Guided Pseudo-Labeling

Fabian Dubourvieux, Romaric Audigier, Angélique Loesch, Ainouz-Zemouche Samia, Stéphane Canu

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Auto-TLDR; Pseudo-labeling for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Person Re-Identification

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Person Re-Identification (re-ID) aims at retrieving images of the same person taken by different cameras. A challenge for re-ID is the performance preservation when a model is used on data of interest (target data) which belong to a different domain from the training data domain (source data). Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is an interesting research direction for this challenge as it avoids a costly annotation of the target data. Pseudo-labeling methods achieve the best results in UDA-based re-ID. They incrementally learn with identity pseudo-labels which are initialized by clustering features in the source re-ID encoder space. Surprisingly, labeled source data are discarded after this initialization step. However, we believe that pseudo-labeling could further leverage the labeled source data in order to improve the post-initialization training steps. In order to improve robustness against erroneous pseudo-labels, we advocate the exploitation of both labeled source data and pseudo-labeled target data during all training iterations. To support our guideline, we introduce a framework which relies on a two-branch architecture optimizing classification in source and target domains, respectively, in order to allow adaptability to the target domain while ensuring robustness to noisy pseudo-labels. Indeed, shared low and mid-level parameters benefit from the source classification signal while high-level parameters of the target branch learn domain-specific features. Our method is simple enough to be easily combined with existing pseudo-labeling UDA approaches. We show experimentally that it is efficient and improves performance when the base method has no mechanism to deal with pseudo-label noise. And it maintains performance when combined with base method that already manages pseudo-label noise. Our approach reaches state-of-the-art performance when evaluated on commonly used datasets, Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID, and outperforms the state of the art when targeting the bigger and more challenging dataset MSMT.

Enlarging Discriminative Power by Adding an Extra Class in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Hai Tran, Sumyeong Ahn, Taeyoung Lee, Yung Yi

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation using Artificial Classes

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We study the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation that aims at obtaining a prediction model for the target domain using labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain. There exists an array of recent research based on the idea of extracting features that are not only invariant for both domains but also provide high discriminative power for the target domain. In this paper, we propose an idea of improving the discriminativeness: Adding an extra artificial class and training the model on the given data together with the GAN-generated samples of the new class. The trained model based on the new class samples is capable of extracting the features that are more discriminative by repositioning data of current classes in the target domain and therefore increasing the distances among the target clusters in the feature space. Our idea is highly generic so that it is compatible with many existing methods such as DANN, VADA, and DIRT-T. We conduct various experiments for the standard data commonly used for the evaluation of unsupervised domain adaptations and demonstrate that our algorithm achieves the SOTA performance for many scenarios.

DAPC: Domain Adaptation People Counting Via Style-Level Transfer Learning and Scene-Aware Estimation

Na Jiang, Xingsen Wen, Zhiping Shi

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Auto-TLDR; Domain Adaptation People counting via Style-Level Transfer Learning and Scene-Aware Estimation

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People counting concentrates on predicting the number of people in surveillance images. It remains challenging due to the rich variations in scene type and crowd density. Besides, the limited closed-set with ground truth from reality significantly increase the difficulty of people counting in actual open-set. Targeting to solve these problems, this paper proposes a domain adaptation people counting via style-level transfer learning (STL) and scene-aware estimation (SAE). The style-level transfer learning explicitly leverages the style constraint and content similarity between images to learn effective knowledge transfer, which narrows the gap between closed-set and open-set by generating domain adaptation images. The scene-aware estimation introduces scene classifier to provide scene-aware weights for adaptively fusing density maps, which alleviates interference of variations in scene type and crowd density on domain adaptation people counting. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that images generated by STL are more suitable for domain adaptation learning and our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on multiple cross-domain pairs.

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.

Adversarially Constrained Interpolation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Mohamed Azzam, Aurele Tohokantche Gnanha, Hau-San Wong, Si Wu

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Domain Mixup Strategy

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We address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) which aims at adapting models trained on a labeled domain to a completely unlabeled domain. One way to achieve this goal is to learn a domain-invariant representation. However, this approach is subject to two challenges: samples from two domains are insufficient to guarantee domain-invariance at most part of the latent space, and neighboring samples from the target domain may not belong to the same class on the low-dimensional manifold. To mitigate these shortcomings, we propose two strategies. First, we incorporate a domain mixup strategy in domain adversarial learning model by linearly interpolating between the source and target domain samples. This allows the latent space to be continuous and yields an improvement of the domain matching. Second, the domain discriminator is regularized via judging the relative difference between both domains for the input mixup features, which speeds up the domain matching. Experiment results show that our proposed model achieves a superior performance on different tasks under various domain shifts and data complexity.

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.

Small Object Detection Leveraging on Simultaneous Super-Resolution

Hong Ji, Zhi Gao, Xiaodong Liu, Tiancan Mei

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Auto-TLDR; Super-Resolution via Generative Adversarial Network for Small Object Detection

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Despite the impressive advancement achieved in object detection, the detection performance of small object is still far from satisfactory due to the lack of sufficient detailed appearance to distinguish it from similar objects. Inspired by the positive effects of super-resolution for object detection, we propose a general framework that can be incorporated with most available detector networks to significantly improve the performance of small object detection, in which the low-resolution image is super-resolved via generative adversarial network (GAN) in an unsupervised manner. In our method, the super-resolution network and the detection network are trained jointly and alternately with each other fixed. In particular, the detection loss is back-propagated into the super-resolution network during training to facilitate detection. Compared with available simultaneous super-resolution and detection methods which heavily rely on low-/high-resolution image pairs, our work breaks through such restriction via applying the CycleGAN strategy, achieving increased generality and applicability, while remaining an elegant structure. Extensive experiments on datasets from both computer vision and remote sensing communities demonstrate that our method works effectively on a wide range of complex scenarios, resulting in best performance that significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art approaches.

A Simple Domain Shifting Network for Generating Low Quality Images

Guruprasad Hegde, Avinash Nittur Ramesh, Kanchana Vaishnavi Gandikota, Michael Möller, Roman Obermaisser

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Auto-TLDR; Robotic Image Classification Using Quality degrading networks

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Deep Learning systems have proven to be extremely successful for image recognition tasks for which significant amounts of training data is available, e.g., on the famous ImageNet dataset. We demonstrate that for robotics applications with cheap camera equipment, the low image quality, however, influences the classification accuracy, and freely available data bases cannot be exploited in a straight forward way to train classifiers to be used on a robot. As a solution we propose to train a network on degrading the quality images in order to mimic specific low quality imaging systems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that classification networks trained by using images produced by our quality degrading network along with the high quality images outperform classification networks trained only on high quality data when used on a real robot system, while being significantly easier to use than competing zero-shot domain adaptation techniques.

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

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

Spatial-Aware GAN for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Fangneng Zhan, Changgong Zhang

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Person Re-Identification

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The recent person re-identification research has achieved great success by learning from a large number of labeled person images. On the other hand, the learned models often experience significant performance drops when applied to images collected in a different environment. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been investigated to mitigate this constraint, but most existing systems adapt images at pixel level only and ignore obvious discrepancies at spatial level. This paper presents an innovative UDA-based person re-identification network that is capable of adapting images at both spatial and pixel levels simultaneously. A novel disentangled cycle-consistency loss is designed which guides the learning of spatial-level and pixel-level adaptation in a collaborative manner. In addition, a novel multi-modal mechanism is incorporated which is capable of generating images of different geometry views and augmenting training images effectively. Extensive experiments over a number of public datasets show that the proposed UDA network achieves superior person re-identification performance as compared with the state-of-the-art.

Text Recognition in Real Scenarios with a Few Labeled Samples

Jinghuang Lin, Cheng Zhanzhan, Fan Bai, Yi Niu, Shiliang Pu, Shuigeng Zhou

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Auto-TLDR; Few-shot Adversarial Sequence Domain Adaptation for Scene Text Recognition

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Scene text recognition (STR) is still a hot research topic in computer vision field due to its various applications. Existing works mainly focus on learning a general model with a huge number of synthetic text images to recognize unconstrained scene texts, and have achieved substantial progress. However, these methods are not quite applicable in many real-world scenarios where 1) high recognition accuracy is required, while 2) labeled samples are lacked. To tackle this challenging problem, this paper proposes a few-shot adversarial sequence domain adaptation (FASDA) approach to build sequence adaptation between the synthetic source domain (with many synthetic labeled samples) and a specific target domain (with only some or a few real labeled samples). This is done by simultaneously learning each character’s feature representation with an attention mech- anism and establishing the corresponding character-level latent subspace with adversarial learning. Our approach can maximize the character-level confusion between the source domain and the target domain, thus achieves the sequence-level adaptation with even a small number of labeled samples in the target domain. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that our method significantly outperforms the finetuning scheme, and obtains comparable performance to the state-of-the-art STR methods.

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.

Domain Generalized Person Re-Identification Via Cross-Domain Episodic Learning

Ci-Siang Lin, Yuan Chia Cheng, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Domain-Invariant Person Re-identification with Episodic Learning

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Aiming at recognizing images of the same person across distinct camera views, person re-identification (re-ID) has been among active research topics in computer vision. Most existing re-ID works require collection of a large amount of labeled image data from the scenes of interest. When the data to be recognized are different from the source-domain training ones, a number of domain adaptation approaches have been proposed. Nevertheless, one still needs to collect labeled or unlabelled target-domain data during training. In this paper, we tackle an even more challenging and practical setting, domain generalized (DG) person re-ID. That is, while a number of labeled source-domain datasets are available, we do not have access to any target-domain training data. In order to learn domain-invariant features without knowing the target domain of interest, we present an episodic learning scheme which advances meta learning strategies to exploit the observed source-domain labeled data. The learned features would exhibit sufficient domain-invariant properties while not overfitting the source-domain data or ID labels. Our experiments on four benchmark datasets confirm the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-arts.

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.

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.

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.

Progressive Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Image-Based Person Re-Identification

Mingliang Yang, Da Huang, Jing Zhao

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Auto-TLDR; Progressive Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Person Re-Identification

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Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has emerged as an effective paradigm for reducing the huge manual annotation cost for Person Re-Identification (Re-ID). Many of the recent UDA methods for Re-ID are clustering-based and select all the pseudo-label samples in each iteration for the model training. However, there are many wrong labeled samples that will mislead the model optimization under this circumstance. To solve this problem, we propose a Progressive Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (PUDA) framework for image-based Person Re-ID to reduce the negative effect of wrong pseudo-label samples on the model training process. Specifically, we first pretrain a CNN model on a labeled source dataset, then finetune the model on unlabeled target dataset with the following three steps iteratively: 1) estimating pseudo-labels for all the images in the target dataset with the model trained in the last iteration; 2) extending the training set by adding pseudo-label samples with higher label confidence; 3) updating the CNN model with the expanded training set in a supervised manner. During the iteration process, the number of pseudo-label samples added increased progressively. In particular, a Moderate Initial Selections (MIS) strategy for pseudo-label sampling is also proposed to reduce the negative impacts of random noise features in the early iterations and mislabeled samples in the late iterations on the model. The proposed framework with MIS strategy is validated on the Duke-to-Market, Market-to-Duke unsupervised domain adaptation tasks and achieves improvements of 4.2 points (absolute, i.e., 80.0% vs. 75.8%) and 1.7 points (absolute, i.e., 70.7% vs. 69.0%) in mAP correspondingly.

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.

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.

Self-Training for Domain Adaptive Scene Text Detection

Yudi Chen, Wei Wang, Yu Zhou, Fei Yang, Dongbao Yang, Weiping Wang

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Auto-TLDR; A self-training framework for image-based scene text detection

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Though deep learning based scene text detection has achieved great progress, well-trained detectors suffer from severe performance degradation for different domains. In general, a tremendous amount of data is indispensable to train the detector in the target domain. However, data collection and annotation are expensive and time-consuming. To address this problem, we propose a self-training framework to automatically mine hard examples with pseudo-labels from unannotated videos or images. To reduce the noise of hard examples, a novel text mining module is implemented based on the fusion of detection and tracking results. Then, an image-to-video generation method is designed for the tasks that videos are unavailable and only images can be used. Experimental results on standard benchmarks, including ICDAR2015, MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2017 MLT, demonstrate the effectiveness of our self-training method. The simple Mask R-CNN adapted with self-training and fine-tuned on real data can achieve comparable or even superior results with the state-of-the-art methods.

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.

Detail Fusion GAN: High-Quality Translation for Unpaired Images with GAN-Based Data Augmentation

Ling Li, Yaochen Li, Chuan Wu, Hang Dong, Peilin Jiang, Fei Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Data Augmentation with GAN-based Generative Adversarial Network

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Image-to-image translation, a task to learn the mapping relation between two different domains, is a rapid-growing research field in deep learning. Although existing Generative Adversarial Network(GAN)-based methods have achieved decent results in this field, there are still some limitations in generating high-quality images for practical applications (e.g., data augmentation and image inpainting). In this work, we aim to propose a GAN-based network for data augmentation which can generate translated images with more details and less artifacts. The proposed Detail Fusion Generative Adversarial Network(DFGAN) consists of a detail branch, a transfer branch, a filter module, and a reconstruction module. The detail branch is trained by a super-resolution loss and its intermediate features can be used to introduce more details to the transfer branch by the filter module. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our model generates more satisfactory images against the state-of-the-art approaches for data augmentation.

Efficient Shadow Detection and Removal Using Synthetic Data with Domain Adaptation

Rui Guo, Babajide Ayinde, Hao Sun

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Auto-TLDR; Shadow Detection and Removal with Domain Adaptation and Synthetic Image Database

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In recent years, learning based shadow detection and removal approaches have shown prospects and, in most cases, yielded state-of-the-art results. The performance of these approaches, however, relies heavily on the construction of training database of shadow images, shadow-free versions, and shadow maps as ground truth. This conventional data gathering method is time-consuming, expensive, or even practically intractable to realize especially for outdoor scenes with complicated shadow patterns, thus limiting the size of the data available for training. In this paper, we leverage on large high quality synthetic image database and domain adaptation to eliminate the bottlenecks resulting from insufficient training samples and domain bias. Specifically, our approach utilizes adversarial training to predict near-pixel-perfect shadow map from synthetic shadow image for downstream shadow removal steps. At inference time, we capitalize on domain adaptation via image style transfer to map the style of real- world scene to that of synthetic scene for the purpose of detecting and subsequently removing shadow. Comprehensive experiments indicate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on select benchmark datasets.

Object Features and Face Detection Performance: Analyses with 3D-Rendered Synthetic Data

Jian Han, Sezer Karaoglu, Hoang-An Le, Theo Gevers

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Auto-TLDR; Synthetic Data for Face Detection Using 3DU Face Dataset

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This paper is to provide an overview of how object features from images influence face detection performance, and how to select synthetic faces to address specific features. To this end, we investigate the effects of occlusion, scale, viewpoint, background, and noise by using a novel synthetic image generator based on 3DU Face Dataset. To examine the effects of different features, we selected three detectors (Faster RCNN, HR, SSH) as representative of various face detection methodologies. Comparing different configurations of synthetic data on face detection systems, it showed that our synthetic dataset could complement face detectors to become more robust against features in the real world. Our analysis also demonstrated that a variety of data augmentation is necessary to address nuanced differences in performance.

Object Detection Model Based on Scene-Level Region Proposal Self-Attention

Yu Quan, Zhixin Li, Canlong Zhang, Huifang Ma

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Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Semantic Informations for Object Detection

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The improvement of object detection performance is mostly focused on the extraction of local information near the region of interest in the image, which results in detection performance in this area being unable to achieve the desired effect. First, a depth-wise separable convolution network(D_SCNet-127 R-CNN) is built on the backbone network. Considering the importance of scene and semantic informations for visual recognition, the feature map is sent into the branch of the semantic segmentation module, region proposal network module, and the region proposal self-attention module to build the network of scene-level and region proposal self-attention module. Second, a deep reinforcement learning was utilized to achieve accurate positioning of border regression, and the calculation speed of the whole model was improved through implementing a light-weight head network. This model can effectively solve the limitation of feature extraction in traditional object detection and obtain more comprehensive detailed features. The experimental verification on MSCOCO17, VOC12, and Cityscapes datasets shows that the proposed method has good validity and scalability.

A Unified Framework for Distance-Aware Domain Adaptation

Fei Wang, Youdong Ding, Huan Liang, Yuzhen Gao, Wenqi Che

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Auto-TLDR; distance-aware domain adaptation

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Unsupervised domain adaptation has achieved significant results by leveraging knowledge from a source domain to learn a related but unlabeled target domain. Previous methods are insufficient to model domain discrepancy and class discrepancy, which may lead to misalignment and poor adaptation performance. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a unified framework, called distance-aware domain adaptation, which is fully aware of both cross-domain distance and class-discriminative distance. In addition, second-order statistics distance and manifold alignment are also exploited to extract more information from data. In this manner, the generalization error of the target domain in classification problems can be reduced substantially. To validate the proposed method, we conducted experiments on five public datasets and an ablation study. The results demonstrate the good performance of our proposed method.

Cascade Saliency Attention Network for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Dayang Yu, Rong Zhang, Shan Qin

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Auto-TLDR; Cascade Saliency Attention Network for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

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Object detection in remote sensing images is a challenging task due to objects in the bird-view perspective appearing with arbitrary orientations. Though considerable progress has been made, there still exist challenges with the interference from complex backgrounds, dense arrangement, and large-scale variations. In this paper, we propose an oriented detector named Cascade Saliency Attention Network (CSAN), designed for comprehensively suppressing interference in remote sensing images. Specifically, we first combine context and pixel attention on feature maps to enhance saliency of objects for suppressing interference from backgrounds. Then, in cascade network, we apply instance segmentation on ROI to increase saliency of the central object, thus preventing object features from mutual interference in dense arrangement. Additionally, to alleviate large-scale variations, we devise a multi-scale merge module during FPN merging process to learn richer scale representations. Experimental results on DOTA and HRSC2016 datasets outperform other state-of-the-art object detection methods and verify the effectiveness of our method.

Self-Supervised Domain Adaptation with Consistency Training

Liang Xiao, Jiaolong Xu, Dawei Zhao, Zhiyu Wang, Li Wang, Yiming Nie, Bin Dai

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Image Classification

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We consider the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for image classification. To learn target-domain-aware features from the unlabeled data, we create a self-supervised pretext task by augmenting the unlabeled data with a certain type of transformation (specifically, image rotation) and ask the learner to predict the properties of the transformation. However, the obtained feature representation may contain a large amount of irrelevant information with respect to the main task. To provide further guidance, we force the feature representation of the augmented data to be consistent with that of the original data. Intuitively, the consistency introduces additional constraints to representation learning, therefore, the learned representation is more likely to focus on the right information about the main task. Our experimental results validate the proposed method and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on classical domain adaptation benchmarks.

Thermal Image Enhancement Using Generative Adversarial Network for Pedestrian Detection

Mohamed Amine Marnissi, Hajer Fradi, Anis Sahbani, Najoua Essoukri Ben Amara

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Auto-TLDR; Improving Visual Quality of Infrared Images for Pedestrian Detection Using Generative Adversarial Network

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Infrared imaging has recently played an important role in a wide range of applications including surveillance, robotics and night vision. However, infrared cameras often suffer from some limitations, essentially about low-contrast and blurred details. These problems contribute to the loss of observation of target objects in infrared images, which could limit the feasibility of different infrared imaging applications. In this paper, we mainly focus on the problem of pedestrian detection on thermal images. Particularly, we emphasis the need for enhancing the visual quality of images beforehand performing the detection step. % to ensure effective results. To address that, we propose a novel thermal enhancement architecture based on Generative Adversarial Network, and composed of two modules contrast enhancement and denoising modules with a post-processing step for edge restoration in order to improve the overall quality. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is assessed by means of visual quality metrics and better results are obtained compared to the original thermal images and to the obtained results by other existing enhancement methods. These results have been conduced on a subset of KAIST dataset. Using the same dataset, the impact of the proposed enhancement architecture has been demonstrated on the detection results by obtaining better performance with a significant margin using YOLOv3 detector.

CANU-ReID: A Conditional Adversarial Network for Unsupervised Person Re-IDentification

Guillaume Delorme, Yihong Xu, Stéphane Lathuiliere, Radu Horaud, Xavier Alameda-Pineda

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Person Re-Identification with Clustering and Adversarial Learning

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Unsupervised person re-ID is the task of identifying people on a target data set for which the ID labels are unavailable during training. In this paper, we propose to unify two trends in unsupervised person re-ID: clustering & fine-tuning and adversarial learning. On one side, clustering groups training images into pseudo-ID labels, and uses them to fine-tune the feature extractor. On the other side, adversarial learning is used, inspired by domain adaptation, to match distributions from different domains. Since target data is distributed across different camera viewpoints, we propose to model each camera as an independent domain, and aim to learn domain-independent features. Straightforward adversarial learning yields negative transfer, we thus introduce a conditioning vector to mitigate this undesirable effect. In our framework, the centroid of the cluster to which the visual sample belongs is used as conditioning vector of our conditional adversarial network, where the vector is permutation invariant (clusters ordering does not matter) and its size is independent of the number of clusters. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose the use of conditional adversarial networks for unsupervised person re-ID. We evaluate the proposed architecture on top of two state-of-the-art clustering-based unsupervised person re-identification (re-ID) methods on four different experimental settings with three different data sets and set the new state-of-the-art performance on all four of them. Our code and model will be made publicly available at https://team.inria.fr/perception/canu-reid/.

Convolutional STN for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

Akhil Meethal, Marco Pedersoli, Soufiane Belharbi, Eric Granger

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Auto-TLDR; Spatial Localization for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

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Weakly-supervised object localization is a challenging task in which the object of interest should be localized while learning its appearance. State-of-the-art methods recycle the architecture of a standard CNN by using the activation maps of the last layer for localizing the object. While this approach is simple and works relatively well, object localization relies on different features than classification, thus, a specialized localization mechanism is required during training to improve performance. In this paper, we propose a convolutional, multi-scale spatial localization network that provides accurate localization for the object of interest. Experimental results on CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet datasets show competitive performance of our proposed approach on Weakly supervised localization.