Context for Object Detection Via Lightweight Global and Mid-Level Representations

Mesut Erhan Unal, Adriana Kovashka

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Auto-TLDR; Context-Based Object Detection with Semantic Similarity

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We propose an approach for explicitly capturing context in object detection. We model visual and geometric relationships between object regions, but also model the global scene as a first-class participant. In contrast to prior approaches, both the context we rely on, as well as our proposed mechanism for belief propagation over regions, is lightweight. We also experiment with capturing similarities between regions at a semantic level, by modeling class co-occurrence and linguistic similarity between class names. We show that our approach significantly outperforms Faster R-CNN, and performs competitively with a much more costly approach that also models context.

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Object Detection Using Dual Graph Network

Shengjia Chen, Zhixin Li, Feicheng Huang, Canlong Zhang, Huifang Ma

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Auto-TLDR; A Graph Convolutional Network for Object Detection with Key Relation Information

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Most object detection methods focus only on the local information near the region proposal and ignore the object's global semantic relation and local spatial relation information, resulting in limited performance. To capture and explore these important relations, we propose a detection method based on a graph convolutional network (GCN). Two independent relation graph networks are used to obtain the global semantic information of the object in labels and the local spatial information in images. Semantic relation networks can implicitly acquire global knowledge, and by constructing a directed graph on the dataset, each node is represented by the word embedding of labels and then sent to the GCN to obtain high-level semantic representation. The spatial relation network encodes the relation by the positional relation module and the visual connection module, and enriches the object features through local key information from objects. The feature representation is further improved by aggregating the outputs of the two networks. Instead of directly disseminating visual features in the network, the dual-graph network explores more advanced feature information, giving the detector the ability to obtain key relations in labels and region proposals. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets demonstrate that key relation information significantly improve the performance of detection with better ability to detect small objects and reasonable boduning box. The results on COCO dataset demonstrate our method obtains around 32.3% improvement on AP in terms of small objects.

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

Yu Zhang, Xiaoyu Wu, Ruolin Zhu

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Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Word Embedding Module for Object Detection

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

Using Scene Graphs for Detecting Visual Relationships

Anurag Tripathi, Siddharth Srivastava, Brejesh Lall, Santanu Chaudhury

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Auto-TLDR; Relationship Detection using Context Aligned Scene Graph Embeddings

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In this paper we solve the problem of detecting relationships between pairs of objects in an image. We develop spatially aware word embeddings using scene graphs and use joint feature representations containing visual, spatial and semantic embeddings from the input images to train a deep network on the task of relationship detection. Further, we propose to utilize context aligned scene graph embeddings from the train set, without requiring explicit availability of scene graphs at test time. We show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for predicate detection and provides competing results on relationship detection. We also show the generalization ability of the proposed method by performing predictions under zero shot settings. Further, we also provide an exhaustive empirical evaluation on each component of the proposed network.

MAGNet: Multi-Region Attention-Assisted Grounding of Natural Language Queries at Phrase Level

Amar Shrestha, Krittaphat Pugdeethosapol, Haowen Fang, Qinru Qiu

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Auto-TLDR; MAGNet: A Multi-Region Attention-Aware Grounding Network for Free-form Textual Queries

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Grounding free-form textual queries necessitates an understanding of these textual phrases and its relation to the visual cues to reliably reason about the described locations. Spatial attention networks are known to learn this relationship and focus its gaze on salient objects in the image. Thus, we propose to utilize spatial attention networks for image-level visual-textual fusion preserving local (word) and global (phrase) information to refine region proposals with an in-network Region Proposal Network (RPN) and detect single or multiple regions for a phrase query. We focus only on the phrase query - ground truth pair (referring expression) for a model independent of the constraints of the datasets i.e. additional attributes, context etc. For such referring expression dataset ReferIt game, our Multi- region Attention-assisted Grounding network (MAGNet) achieves over 12% improvement over the state-of-the-art. Without the con- text from image captions and attribute information in Flickr30k Entities, we still achieve competitive results compared to the state- of-the-art.

Incrementally Zero-Shot Detection by an Extreme Value Analyzer

Sixiao Zheng, Yanwei Fu, Yanxi Hou

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Auto-TLDR; IZSD-EVer: Incremental Zero-Shot Detection for Incremental Learning

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Human beings not only have the ability of recogniz-ing novel unseen classes, but also can incrementally incorporatethe new classes to existing knowledge preserved. However, thezero-shot learning models assume that all seen classes should beknown beforehand, while incremental learning models cannotrecognize unseen classes. This paper introduces a novel andchallenging task of Incrementally Zero-Shot Detection (IZSD),a practical strategy for both zero-shot learning and class-incremental learning in real-world object detection. An innovativeend-to-end model – IZSD-EVer was proposed to tackle this taskthat requires incrementally detecting new classes and detectingthe classes that have never been seen. Specifically, we proposea novel extreme value analyzer to simultaneously detect objectsfrom old seen, new seen, and unseen classes. Additionally andtechnically, we propose two innovative losses, i.e., background-foreground mean squared error loss alleviating the extremeimbalance of the background and foreground of images, andprojection distance loss aligning the visual space and semanticspaces of old seen classes. Experiments demonstrate the efficacyof our model in detecting objects from both the seen and unseenclasses, outperforming the alternative models on Pascal VOC andMSCOCO datasets.

Boundary-Aware Graph Convolution for Semantic Segmentation

Hanzhe Hu, Jinshi Cui, Jinshi Hongbin Zha

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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.

Human-Centric Parsing Network for Human-Object Interaction Detection

Guanyu Chen, Chong Chen, Zhicheng Zhao, Fei Su

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Auto-TLDR; Human-Centric Parsing Network for Human-Object Interactions Detection

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Human-object interactions detection is an essential task of image inference, but current methods can’t efficiently make use of global knowledge in the image. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Human-Centric Parsing Network (HCPN), which integrates global structural knowledge to infer human-object interactions. In HCPN, a semantic parse graph is first constructed by binding human-object relationships, edge features and node features, where the detected human box in image is regarded as the center node and other detected boxes are linked to it. Second, based on the message passing mechanism, edge features and node features with the relation graph are updated and finally, HCPN predicts human-object interactions and associated locations by a readout function. We evaluate our model on V-COCO dataset, and a great improvement is achieved compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Exploring and Exploiting the Hierarchical Structure of a Scene for Scene Graph Generation

Ikuto Kurosawa, Tetsunori Kobayashi, Yoshihiko Hayashi

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Auto-TLDR; A Hierarchical Model for Scene Graph Generation

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The scene graph of an image is an explicit, concise representation of the image; hence, it can be used in various applications such as visual question answering or robot vision. We propose a novel neural network model for generating scene graphs that maintain global consistency, which prevents the generation of unrealistic scene graphs; the performance in the scene graph generation task is expected to improve. Our proposed model is used to construct a hierarchical structure whose leaf nodes correspond to objects depicted in the image, and a message is passed along the estimated structure on the fly. To this end, we aggregate features of all objects into the root node of the hierarchical structure, and the global context is back-propagated to the root node to maintain all the object nodes. The experimental results on the Visual Genome dataset indicate that the proposed model outperformed the existing models in scene graph generation tasks. We further qualitatively confirmed that the hierarchical structures captured by the proposed model seemed to be valid.

More Correlations Better Performance: Fully Associative Networks for Multi-Label Image Classification

Yaning Li, Liu Yang

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Auto-TLDR; Fully Associative Network for Fully Exploiting Correlation Information in Multi-Label Classification

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Recent researches demonstrate that correlation modeling plays a key role in high-performance multi-label classification methods. However, existing methods do not take full advantage of correlation information, especially correlations in feature and label spaces of each image, which limits the performance of correlation-based multi-label classification methods. With more correlations considered, in this study, a Fully Associative Network (FAN) is proposed for fully exploiting correlation information, which involves both visual feature and label correlations. Specifically, FAN introduces a robust covariance pooling to summarize convolution features as global image representation for capturing feature correlation in the multi-label task. Moreover, it constructs an effective label correlation matrix based on a re-weighted scheme, which is fed into a graph convolution network for capturing label correlation. Then, correlation between covariance representations (i.e., feature correlation ) and the outputs of GCN (i.e., label correlation) are modeled for final prediction. Experimental results on two datasets illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed FAN compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Detective: An Attentive Recurrent Model for Sparse Object Detection

Amine Kechaou, Manuel Martinez, Monica Haurilet, Rainer Stiefelhagen

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

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

Improving Visual Relation Detection Using Depth Maps

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

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Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Depth Maps for Visual Relation Detection

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

Zero-Shot Text Classification with Semantically Extended Graph Convolutional Network

Tengfei Liu, Yongli Hu, Junbin Gao, Yanfeng Sun, Baocai Yin

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Auto-TLDR; Semantically Extended Graph Convolutional Network for Zero-shot Text Classification

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As a challenging task of Natural Language Processing(NLP), zero-shot text classification has attracted more and more attention recently. It aims to detect classes that the model has never seen in the training set. For this purpose, a feasible way is to construct connection between the seen and unseen classes by semantic extension and classify the unseen classes by information propagation over the connection. Although many related zero-shot text classification methods have been exploited, how to realize semantic extension properly and propagate information effectively is far from solved. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot text classification method called Semantically Extended Graph Convolutional Network (SEGCN). In the proposed method, the semantic category knowledge from ConceptNet is utilized to semantic extension for linking seen classes to unseen classes and constructing a graph of all classes. Then, we build upon Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) for predicting the textual classifier for each category, which transfers the category knowledge by the convolution operators on the constructed graph and is trained in a semi-supervised manner using the samples of the seen classes. The experimental results on Dbpedia and 20newsgroup datasets show that our method outperforms the state of the art zero-shot text classification methods.

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.

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

Semantics to Space(S2S): Embedding Semantics into Spatial Space for Zero-Shot Verb-Object Query Inferencing

Sungmin Eum, Heesung Kwon

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Auto-TLDR; Semantics-to-Space: Deep Zero-Shot Learning for Verb-Object Interaction with Vectors

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We present a novel deep zero-shot learning (ZSL) model for inferencing human-object-interaction with verb-object (VO) query. While the previous two-stream ZSL approaches only use the semantic/textual information to be fed into the query stream, we seek to incorporate and embed the semantics into the visual representation stream as well. Our approach is powered by Semantics-to-Space (S2S) architecture where semantics derived from the residing objects are embedded into a spatial space of the visual stream. This architecture allows the co-capturing of the semantic attributes of the human and the objects along with their location/size/silhouette information. To validate, we have constructed a new dataset, Verb-Transferability 60 (VT60). VT60 provides 60 different VO pairs with overlapping verbs tailored for testing two-stream ZSL approaches with VO query. Experimental evaluations show that our approach not only outperforms the state-of-the-art, but also shows the capability of consistently improving performance regardless of which ZSL baseline architecture is used.

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

Jin Hyeok Yoo, Dongsuk Kum, Jun Won Choi

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

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

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

Prior Knowledge about Attributes: Learning a More Effective Potential Space for Zero-Shot Recognition

Chunlai Chai, Yukuan Lou

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Auto-TLDR; Attribute Correlation Potential Space Generation for Zero-Shot Learning

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Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen classes accurately by learning seen classes and known attributes, but correlations in attributes were ignored by previous study which lead to classification results confused. To solve this problem, we build an Attribute Correlation Potential Space Generation (ACPSG) model which uses a graph convolution network and attribute correlation to generate a more discriminating potential space. Combining potential discrimination space and user-defined attribute space, we can better classify unseen classes. Our approach outperforms some existing state-of-the-art methods on several benchmark datasets, whether it is conventional ZSL or generalized ZSL.

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.

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.

Open Set Domain Recognition Via Attention-Based GCN and Semantic Matching Optimization

Xinxing He, Yuan Yuan, Zhiyu Jiang

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Auto-TLDR; Attention-based GCN and Semantic Matching Optimization for Open Set Domain Recognition

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Open set domain recognition has got the attention in recent years. The task aims to specifically classify each sample in the practical unlabeled target domain, which consists of all known classes in the manually labeled source domain and target-specific unknown categories. The absence of annotated training data or auxiliary attribute information for unknown categories makes this task especially difficult. Moreover, exiting domain discrepancy in label space and data distribution further distracts the knowledge transferred from known classes to unknown classes. To address these issues, this work presents an end-to-end model based on attention-based GCN and semantic matching optimization, which first employs the attention mechanism to enable the central node to learn more discriminating representations from its neighbors in the knowledge graph. Moreover, a coarse-to-fine semantic matching optimization approach is proposed to progressively bridge the domain gap. Experimental results validate that the proposed model not only has superiority on recognizing the images of known and unknown classes, but also can adapt to various openness of the target domain.

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.

Multi-Modal Contextual Graph Neural Network for Text Visual Question Answering

Yaoyuan Liang, Xin Wang, Xuguang Duan, Wenwu Zhu

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-modal Contextual Graph Neural Network for Text Visual Question Answering

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Text visual question answering (TextVQA) targets at answering the question related to texts appearing in the given images, posing more challenges than VQA by requiring a deeper recognition and understanding of various shapes of human-readable scene texts as well as their meanings in different contexts. Existing works on TextVQA suffer from two weaknesses: i) scene texts and non-textual objects are processed separately and independently without considering their mutual interactions during the question understanding and answering process, ii) scene texts are encoded only through word embeddings without taking the corresponding visual appearance features as well as their potential relationships with other non-textual objects in the images into account. To overcome the weakness of exiting works, we propose a novel multi-modal contextual graph neural network (MCG) model for TextVQA. The proposed MCG model can capture the relationships between visual features of scene texts and non-textual objects in the given images as well as utilize richer sources of multi-modal features to improve the model performance. In particular, we encode the scene texts into richer features containing textual, visual and positional features, then model the visual relations between scene texts and non-textual objects through a contextual graph neural network. Our extensive experiments on real-world dataset demonstrate the advantages of the proposed MCG model over baseline approaches.

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%.

Question-Agnostic Attention for Visual Question Answering

Moshiur R Farazi, Salman Hameed Khan, Nick Barnes

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Auto-TLDR; Question-Agnostic Attention for Visual Question Answering

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Visual Question Answering (VQA) models employ attention mechanisms to discover image locations that are most relevant for answering a specific question. For this purpose, several multimodal fusion strategies have been proposed, ranging from relatively simple operations (e.g., linear sum) to more complex ones (e.g., Block). The resulting multimodal representations define an intermediate feature space for capturing the interplay between visual and semantic features, that is helpful in selectively focusing on image content. In this paper, we propose a question-agnostic attention mechanism that is complementary to the existing question-dependent attention mechanisms. Our proposed model parses object instances to obtain an `object map' and applies this map on the visual features to generate Question-Agnostic Attention (QAA) features. In contrast to question-dependent attention approaches that are learned end-to-end, the proposed QAA does not involve question-specific training, and can be easily included in almost any existing VQA model as a generic light-weight pre-processing step, thereby adding minimal computation overhead for training. Further, when used in complement with the question-dependent attention, the QAA allows the model to focus on the regions containing objects that might have been overlooked by the learned attention representation. Through extensive evaluation on VQAv1, VQAv2 and TDIUC datasets, we show that incorporating complementary QAA allows state-of-the-art VQA models to perform better, and provides significant boost to simplistic VQA models, enabling them to performance on par with highly sophisticated fusion strategies.

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.

Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images

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

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

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

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.

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.

Privacy Attributes-Aware Message Passing Neural Network for Visual Privacy Attributes Classification

Hanbin Hong, Wentao Bao, Yuan Hong, Yu Kong

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Auto-TLDR; Privacy Attributes-Aware Message Passing Neural Network for Visual Privacy Attribute Classification

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Visual Privacy Attribute Classification (VPAC) identifies privacy information leakage via social media images. These images containing privacy attributes such as skin color, face or gender are classified into multiple privacy attribute categories in VPAC. With limited works in this task, current methods often extract features from images and simply classify the extracted feature into multiple privacy attribute classes. The dependencies between privacy attributes, e.g., skin color and face typically co-exist in the same image, are usually ignored in classification, which causes performance degradation in VPAC. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Privacy Attributes-aware Message Passing Neural Network (PA-MPNN) to address VPAC. Privacy attributes are considered as nodes on a graph and an MPNN is introduced to model the privacy attribute dependencies. To generate representative features for privacy attribute nodes, a class-wise encoder-decoder is proposed to learn a latent space for each attribute. An attention mechanism with multiple correlation matrices is also introduced in MPNN to learn the privacy attributes graph automatically. Experimental results on the Privacy Attribute Dataset demonstrate that our framework achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods on visual privacy attributes classification.

ACRM: Attention Cascade R-CNN with Mix-NMS for Metallic Surface Defect Detection

Junting Fang, Xiaoyang Tan, Yuhui Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Attention Cascade R-CNN with Mix Non-Maximum Suppression for Robust Metal Defect Detection

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Metallic surface defect detection is of great significance in quality control for production. However, this task is very challenging due to the noise disturbance, large appearance variation, and the ambiguous definition of the defect individual. Traditional image processing methods are unable to detect the damaged region effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new defect detection method, Attention Cascade R-CNN with Mix-NMS (ACRM), to classify and locate defects robustly. Three submodules are developed to achieve this goal: 1) a lightweight attention block is introduced, which can improve the ability in capture global and local feature both in the spatial and channel dimension; 2) we firstly apply the cascade R-CNN to our task, which exploits multiple detectors to sequentially refine the detection result robustly; 3) we introduce a new method named Mix Non-Maximum Suppression (Mix-NMS), which can significantly improve its ability in filtering the redundant detection result in our task. Extensive experiments on a real industrial dataset show that ACRM achieves state-of-the-art results compared to the existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of our detection method.

Exploiting Knowledge Embedded Soft Labels for Image Recognition

Lixian Yuan, Riquan Chen, Hefeng Wu, Tianshui Chen, Wentao Wang, Pei Chen

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Auto-TLDR; A Soft Label Vector for Image Recognition

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Objects from correlated classes usually share highly similar appearances while objects from uncorrelated classes are very different. Most of current image recognition works treat each class independently, which ignores these class correlations and inevitably leads to sub-optimal performance in many cases. Fortunately, object classes inherently form a hierarchy with different levels of abstraction and this hierarchy encodes rich correlations among different classes. In this work, we utilize a soft label vector that encodes the prior knowledge of class correlations as extra regularization to train the image classifiers. Specifically, for each class, instead of simply using a one-hot vector, we assign a high value to its correlated classes and assign small values to those uncorrelated ones, thus generating knowledge embedded soft labels. We conduct experiments on both general and fine-grained image recognition benchmarks and demonstrate its superiority compared with existing methods.

Activity and Relationship Modeling Driven Weakly Supervised Object Detection

Yinlin Li, Yang Qian, Xu Yang, Yuren Zhang

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Auto-TLDR; Weakly Supervised Object Detection Using Activity Label and Relationship Modeling

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This paper presents a weakly supervised object detection method based on activity label and relationship modeling, which is motivated by the assumption that configuration of human and object are similar in same activity, and joint modeling of human, active object and activity could leverage the recognition of them. Compared to most weakly supervised method taking object as independent instance, firstly, active human and object proposals are learned and filtered based on class activation map of multi-label classification. Secondly, a spatial relationship prior including relative position, scale, overlaps etc are learned dependent on action. Finally, a multi-stream object detection framework integrating the spatial prior and pairwise ROI pooling are proposed to jointly learn the object and action class. Experiments are conducted on HICO-DET dataset, and our approach outperforms the state of the art weakly supervised object detection methods.

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.

Context Aware Group Activity Recognition

Avijit Dasgupta, C. V. Jawahar, Karteek Alahari

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Auto-TLDR; A Two-Stream Architecture for Group Activity Recognition in Multi-Person Videos

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This paper addresses the task of group activity recognition in multi-person videos. Existing approaches decompose this task into feature learning and relational reasoning. Despite showing progress, these methods only rely on appearance features for people and overlook the available contextual information, which can play an important role in group activity understanding. In this work, we focus on the feature learning aspect and propose a two-stream architecture that not only considers person-level appearance features, but also makes use of contextual information present in videos for group activity recognition. In particular, we propose to use two types of contextual information beneficial for two different scenarios: \textit{pose context} and \textit{scene context} that provide crucial cues for group activity understanding. We combine appearance and contextual features to encode each person with an enriched representation. Finally, these combined features are used in relational reasoning for predicting group activities. We evaluate our method on two benchmarks, Volleyball and Collective Activity and show that joint modeling of contextual information with appearance features benefits in group activity understanding.

Hierarchical Head Design for Object Detectors

Shivang Agarwal, Frederic Jurie

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Auto-TLDR; Hierarchical Anchor for SSD Detector

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

Label Incorporated Graph Neural Networks for Text Classification

Yuan Xin, Linli Xu, Junliang Guo, Jiquan Li, Xin Sheng, Yuanyuan Zhou

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Auto-TLDR; Graph Neural Networks for Semi-supervised Text Classification

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Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success on graph-structured data, and their applications on traditional data structures such as natural language processing and semi-supervised text classification have been extensively explored in recent years. While previous works only consider the text information while building the graph, heterogeneous information such as labels is ignored. In this paper, we consider to incorporate the label information while building the graph by adding text-label-text paths, through which the supervision information will propagate among the graph more directly. Specifically, we treat labels as nodes in the graph which also contains text and word nodes, and then connect labels with texts belonging to that label. Through graph convolutions, label embeddings are jointly learned with text embeddings in the same latent semantic space. The newly incorporated label nodes will facilitate learning more accurate text embeddings by introducing the label information, and thus benefit the downstream text classification tasks. Extensive results on several benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin.

VSR++: Improving Visual Semantic Reasoning for Fine-Grained Image-Text Matching

Hui Yuan, Yan Huang, Dongbo Zhang, Zerui Chen, Wenlong Cheng, Liang Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Improving Visual Semantic Reasoning for Fine-Grained Image-Text Matching

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Image-text matching has made great progresses recently, but there still remains challenges in fine-grained matching. To deal with this problem, we propose an Improved Visual Semantic Reasoning model (VSR++), which jointly models 1) global alignment between images and texts and 2) local correspondence between regions and words in a unified framework. To exploit their complementary advantages, we also develop a suitable learning strategy to balance their relative importance. As a result, our model can distinguish image regions and text words in a fine-grained level, and thus achieves the current stateof-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.

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.

Few-Shot Few-Shot Learning and the Role of Spatial Attention

Yann Lifchitz, Yannis Avrithis, Sylvaine Picard

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Auto-TLDR; Few-shot Learning with Pre-trained Classifier on Large-Scale Datasets

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Few-shot learning is often motivated by the ability of humans to learn new tasks from few examples. However, standard few-shot classification benchmarks assume that the representation is learned on a limited amount of base class data, ignoring the amount of prior knowledge that a human may have accumulated before learning new tasks. At the same time, even if a powerful representation is available, it may happen in some domain that base class data are limited or non-existent. This motivates us to study a problem where the representation is obtained from a classifier pre-trained on a large-scale dataset of a different domain, assuming no access to its training process, while the base class data are limited to few examples per class and their role is to adapt the representation to the domain at hand rather than learn from scratch. We adapt the representation in two stages, namely on the few base class data if available and on the even fewer data of new tasks. In doing so, we obtain from the pre-trained classifier a spatial attention map that allows focusing on objects and suppressing background clutter. This is important in the new problem, because when base class data are few, the network cannot learn where to focus implicitly. We also show that a pre-trained network may be easily adapted to novel classes, without meta-learning.

Efficient-Receptive Field Block with Group Spatial Attention Mechanism for Object Detection

Jiacheng Zhang, Zhicheng Zhao, Fei Su

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Auto-TLDR; E-RFB: Efficient-Receptive Field Block for Deep Neural Network for Object Detection

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Object detection has been paid rising attention in computer vision field. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) extract high-level semantic features of images, which directly determine the performance of object detection. As a common solution, embedding integration modules into CNNs can enrich extracted features and thereby improve the performance. However, the instability and inconsistency of internal multiple branches exist in these modules. To address this problem, we propose a novel multibranch module called Efficient-Receptive Field Block (E-RFB), in which multiple levels of features are combined for network optimization. Specifically, by downsampling and increasing depth, the E-RFB provides sufficient RF. Second, in order to eliminate the inconsistency across different branches, a novel spatial attention mechanism, namely, Group Spatial Attention Module (GSAM) is proposed. The GSAM gradually narrows a feature map by channel grouping; thus it encodes the information between spatial and channel dimensions into the final attention heat map. Third, the proposed module can be easily joined in various CNNs to enhance feature representation as a plug-and-play component. With SSD-style detectors, our method halves the parameters of the original detection head and achieves high accuracy on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets. Moreover, the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods based on similar framework.

Transformer-Encoder Detector Module: Using Context to Improve Robustness to Adversarial Attacks on Object Detection

Faisal Alamri, Sinan Kalkan, Nicolas Pugeault

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Auto-TLDR; Context Module for Robust Object Detection with Transformer-Encoder Detector Module

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Deep neural network approaches have demonstrated high performance in object recognition (CNN) and detection (Faster-RCNN) tasks, but experiments have shown that such architectures are vulnerable to adversarial attacks (FFF, UAP): low amplitude perturbations, barely perceptible by the human eye, can lead to a drastic reduction in labelling performance. This article proposes a new context module, called Transformer-Encoder Detector Module, that can be applied to an object detector to (i) improve the labelling of object instances; and (ii) improve the detector's robustness to adversarial attacks. The proposed model achieves higher mAP, F1 scores and AUC average score of up to 13\% compared to the baseline Faster-RCNN detector, and an mAP score 8 points higher on images subjected to FFF or UAP attacks. The result demonstrates that a simple ad-hoc context module can improve the reliability of object detectors significantly

Iterative Bounding Box Annotation for Object Detection

Bishwo Adhikari, Heikki Juhani Huttunen

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

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

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.

Self-Selective Context for Interaction Recognition

Kilickaya Kilickaya, Noureldien Hussein, Efstratios Gavves, Arnold Smeulders

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Auto-TLDR; Self-Selective Context for Human-Object Interaction Recognition

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Human-object interaction recognition aims for identifying the relationship between a human subject and an object. Researchers incorporate global scene context into the early layers of deep Convolutional Neural Networks as a solution. They report a significant increase in the performance since generally interactions are correlated with the scene (i.e. riding bicycle on the city street). However, this approach leads to the following problems. It increases the network size in the early layers, therefore not efficient. It leads to noisy filter responses when the scene is irrelevant, therefore not accurate. It only leverages scene context whereas human-object interactions offer a multitude of contexts, therefore incomplete. To circumvent these issues, in this work, we propose Self-Selective Context (SSC). SSC operates on the joint appearance of human-objects and context to bring the most discriminative context(s) into play for recognition. We devise novel contextual features that model the locality of human-object interactions and show that SSC can seamlessly integrate with the State-of-the-art interaction recognition models. Our experiments show that SSC leads to an important increase in interaction recognition performance, while using much fewer parameters.

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.

Dual Path Multi-Modal High-Order Features for Textual Content Based Visual Question Answering

Yanan Li, Yuetan Lin, Hongrui Zhao, Donghui Wang

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Auto-TLDR; TextVQA: An End-to-End Visual Question Answering Model for Text-Based VQA

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As a typical cross-modal problem, visual question answering (VQA) has received increasing attention from the communities of computer vision and natural language processing. Reading and reasoning about texts and visual contents in the images is a burgeoning and important research topic in VQA, especially for the visually impaired assistance applications. Given an image, it aims to predict an answer to a provided natural language question closely related to its textual contents. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end textual content based VQA model, which grounds question answering both on the visual and textual information. After encoding the image, question and recognized text words, it uses multi-modal factorized high-order modules and the attention mechanism to fuse question-image and question-text features respectively. The complex correlations among different features can be captured efficiently. To ensure the model's extendibility, it embeds candidate answers and recognized texts in a semantic embedding space and adopts semantic embedding based classifier to perform answer prediction. Extensive experiments on the newly proposed benchmark TextVQA demonstrate that the proposed model can achieve promising results.

StrongPose: Bottom-up and Strong Keypoint Heat Map Based Pose Estimation

Niaz Ahmad, Jongwon Yoon

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Auto-TLDR; StrongPose: A bottom-up box-free approach for human pose estimation and action recognition

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Adaptation of deep convolutional neural network has made revolutionary progress in human pose estimation, various applications in recent years have drawn considerable attention. However, prediction and localization of the keypoints in single and multi-person images are a challenging problem. Towards this purpose, we present a bottom-up box-free approach for the task of pose estimation and action recognition. We proposed a StrongPose system model that uses part-based modeling to tackle object-part associations. The model utilizes a convolution network that learns how to detect Strong Keypoints Heat Maps (SKHM) and predict their comparative displacements, enabling us to group keypoints into person pose instances. Further, we produce Body Heat Maps (BHM) with the help of keypoints which allows us to localize the human body in the picture. The StrongPose framework is based on fully-convolutional engineering and permits proficient inference, with runtime basically autonomous of the number of individuals display within the scene. Train and test on COCO data alone, our framework achieves COCO test-dev keypoint average precision of 0.708 using ResNet-101 and 0.725 using ResNet-152, which considerably outperforms all prior bottom-up pose estimation frameworks.