Cascade R-CNN: High Quality Object Detection and Instance Segmentation

In object detection, the intersection over union (IoU) threshold is frequently used to define positives/negatives. The threshold used to train a detector defines its \textit{quality}. While the commonly used threshold of 0.5 leads to noisy (low-quality) detections, detection performance frequently degrades for larger thresholds. This paradox of high-quality detection has two causes: 1) overfitting, due to vanishing positive samples for large thresholds, and 2) inference-time quality mismatch between detector and test hypotheses. A multi-stage object detection architecture, the Cascade R-CNN, composed of a sequence of detectors trained with increasing IoU thresholds, is proposed to address these problems. The detectors are trained sequentially, using the output of a detector as training set for the next. This resampling progressively improves hypotheses quality, guaranteeing a positive training set of equivalent size for all detectors and minimizing overfitting. The same cascade is applied at inference, to eliminate quality mismatches between hypotheses and detectors. An implementation of the Cascade R-CNN without bells or whistles achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COCO dataset, and significantly improves high-quality detection on generic and specific object detection datasets, including VOC, KITTI, CityPerson, and WiderFace. Finally, the Cascade R-CNN is generalized to instance segmentation, with nontrivial improvements over the Mask R-CNN. To facilitate future research, two implementations are made available at \url{https://github.com/zhaoweicai/cascade-rcnn} (Caffe) and \url{https://github.com/zhaoweicai/Detectron-Cascade-RCNN} (Detectron).

Semantic Fisher Scores for Task Transfer: Using Objects to Classify Scenes

The transfer of a neural network (CNN) trained to recognize objects to the task of scene classification is considered. A Bag-of-Semantics (BoS) representation is first induced, by feeding scene image patches to the object CNN, and representing the scene image by the ensuing bag of posterior class probability vectors (semantic posteriors). The encoding of the BoS with a Fisher vector(FV) is then studied. A link is established between the FV of any probabilistic model and the Q-function of the expectation-maximization(EM) algorithm used to estimate its parameters by maximum likelihood. A network implementation of the MFA Fisher Score (MFA-FS), denoted as the MFAFSNet, is finally proposed to enable end-to-end training. Experiments with various object CNNs and datasets show that the approach has state-of-the-art transfer performance. Somewhat surprisingly, the scene classification results are superior to those of a CNN explicitly trained for scene classification, using a large scene dataset (Places). This suggests that holistic analysis is insufficient for scene classification. The modeling of local object semantics appears to be at least equally important. The two approaches are also shown to be strongly complementary, leading to very large scene classification gains when combined, and outperforming all previous scene classification approaches by a sizeable margin

Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation

Domain adaptation for semantic image segmentation is very necessary since manually labeling large datasets with pixel-level labels is expensive and time consuming. Existing domain adaptation techniques either work on limited datasets, or yield not so good performance compared with supervised learning. In this paper, we propose a novel bidirectional learning framework for domain adaptation of segmentation. Using the bidirectional learning, the image translation model and the segmentation adaptation model can be learned alternatively and promote to each other. Furthermore, we propose a self-supervised learning algorithm to learn a better segmentation adaptation model and in return improve the image translation model. Experiments show that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in domain adaptation of segmentation with a big margin. The source code is available at https://github.com/liyunsheng13/BDL.

REPAIR: Removing Representation Bias by Dataset Resampling

Modern machine learning datasets can have biases for certain representations that are leveraged by algorithms to achieve high performance without learning to solve the underlying task. This problem is referred to as "representation bias". The question of how to reduce the representation biases of a dataset is investigated and a new dataset REPresentAtion bIas Removal (REPAIR) procedure is proposed. This formulates bias minimization as an optimization problem, seeking a weight distribution that penalizes examples easy for a classifier built on a given feature representation. Bias reduction is then equated to maximizing the ratio between the classification loss on the reweighted dataset and the uncertainty of the ground-truth class labels. This is a minimax problem that REPAIR solves by alternatingly updating classifier parameters and dataset resampling weights, using stochastic gradient descent. An experimental set-up is also introduced to measure the bias of any dataset for a given representation, and the impact of this bias on the performance of recognition models. Experiments with synthetic and action recognition data show that dataset REPAIR can significantly reduce representation bias, and lead to improved generalization of models trained on REPAIRed datasets. The tools used for characterizing representation bias, and the proposed dataset REPAIR algorithm, are available at https://github.com/JerryYLi/Dataset-REPAIR/.

Towards Universal Object Detection by Domain Attention

Despite increasing efforts on universal representations for visual recognition, few have addressed object detection. In this paper, we develop an effective and efficient universal object detection system that is capable of working on various image domains, from human faces and traffic signs to medical CT images. Unlike multi-domain models, this universal model does not require prior knowledge of the domain of interest. This is achieved by the introduction of a new family of adaptation layers, based on the principles of squeeze and excitation, and a new domain-attention mechanism. In the proposed universal detector, all parameters and computations are shared across domains, and a single network processes all domains all the time. Experiments, on a newly established universal object detection benchmark of 11 diverse datasets, show that the proposed detector outperforms a bank of individual detectors, a multi-domain detector, and a baseline universal detector, with a 1.3x parameter increase over a single-domain baseline detector. The code and benchmark will be released at http://www.svcl.ucsd.edu/projects/universal-detection/.

Super Diffusion for Salient Object Detection

One major branch of saliency object detection methods is diffusion-based which construct a graph model on a given image and diffuse seed saliency values to the whole graph by a diffusion matrix. While their performance is sensitive to specific feature spaces and scales used for the diffusion matrix definition, little work has been published to systematically promote the robustness and accuracy of salient object detection under the generic mechanism of diffusion. In this work, we firstly present a novel view of the working mechanism of the diffusion process based on mathematical analysis, which reveals that the diffusion process is actually computing the similarity of nodes with respect to the seeds based on diffusion maps. Following this analysis, we propose super diffusion, a novel inclusive learning-based framework for salient object detection, which makes the optimum and robust performance by integrating a large pool of feature spaces, scales and even features originally computed for non-diffusion-based salient object detection. A closed-form solution of the optimal parameters for the integration is determined through supervised learning. At the local level, we propose to promote each individual diffusion before the integration. Our mathematical analysis reveals the close relationship between saliency diffusion and spectral clustering. Based on this, we propose to re-synthesize each individual diffusion matrix from the most discriminative eigenvectors and the constant eigenvector (for saliency normalization). The proposed framework is implemented and experimented on prevalently used benchmark datasets, consistently leading to state-of-the-art performance.

Self-Supervised Generation of Spatial Audio for 360 Video

We introduce an approach to convert mono audio recorded by a 360 video camera into spatial audio, a representation of the distribution of sound over the full viewing sphere. Spatial audio is an important component of immersive 360 video viewing, but spatial audio microphones are still rare in current 360 video production. Our system consists of end-to-end trainable neural networks that separate individual sound sources and localize them on the viewing sphere, conditioned on multi-modal analysis of audio and 360 video frames. We introduce several datasets, including one filmed ourselves, and one collected in-the-wild from YouTube, consisting of 360 videos uploaded with spatial audio. During training, ground-truth spatial audio serves as self-supervision and a mixed down mono track forms the input to our network. Using our approach, we show that it is possible to infer the spatial location of sound sources based only on 360 video and a mono audio track.

Feature Space Transfer for Data Augmentation

The problem of data augmentation in feature space is considered. A new architecture, denoted the FeATure TransfEr Network (FATTEN), is proposed for the modeling of feature trajectories induced by variations of object pose. This architecture exploits a parametrization of the pose manifold in terms of pose and appearance. This leads to a deep encoder/decoder network architecture, where the encoder factors into an appearance and a pose predictor. Unlike previous attempts at trajectory transfer, FATTEN can be efficiently trained end-to-end, with no need to train separate feature transfer functions. This is realized by supplying the decoder with information about a target pose and the use of a multi-task loss that penalizes category- and pose-mismatches. In result, FATTEN discourages discontinuous or non-smooth trajectories that fail to capture the structure of the pose manifold, and generalizes well on object recognition tasks involving large pose variation. Experimental results on the artificial ModelNet database show that it can successfully learn to map source features to target features of a desired pose, while preserving class identity. Most notably, by using feature space transfer for data augmentation (w.r.t. pose and depth) on SUN-RGBD objects, we demonstrate considerable performance improvements on one/few-shot object recognition in a transfer learning setup, compared to current state-of-the-art methods.

Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection

In object detection, an intersection over union (IoU) threshold is required to define positives and negatives. An object detector, trained with low IoU threshold, e.g. 0.5, usually produces noisy detections. However, detection performance tends to degrade with increasing the IoU thresholds. Two main factors are responsible for this: 1) overfitting during training, due to exponentially vanishing positive samples, and 2) inference-time mismatch between the IoUs for which the detector is optimal and those of the input hypotheses. A multi-stage object detection architecture, the Cascade R-CNN, is proposed to address these problems. It consists of a sequence of detectors trained with increasing IoU thresholds, to be sequentially more selective against close false positives. The detectors are trained stage by stage, leveraging the observation that the output of a detector is a good distribution for training the next higher quality detector. The resampling of progressively improved hypotheses guarantees that all detectors have a positive set of examples of equivalent size, reducing the overfitting problem. The same cascade procedure is applied at inference, enabling a closer match between the hypotheses and the detector quality of each stage. A simple implementation of the Cascade R-CNN is shown to surpass all single-model object detectors on the challenging COCO dataset. Experiments also show that the Cascade R-CNN is widely applicable across detector architectures, achieving consistent gains independently of the baseline detector strength. The code will be made available at https://github.com/zhaoweicai/cascade-rcnn.

AGA: Attribute Guided Augmentation

We consider the problem of data augmentation, i.e., generating artificial samples to extend a given corpus of training data. Specifically, we propose attributed-guided augmentation (AGA) which learns a mapping that allows to synthesize data such that an attribute of a synthesized sample is at a desired value or strength. This is particularly interesting in situations where little data with no attribute annotation is available for learning, but we have access to a large external corpus of heavily annotated samples. While prior works primarily augment in the space of images, we propose to perform augmentation in feature space instead. We implement our approach as a deep encoder-decoder architecture that learns the synthesis function in an end-to-end manner. We demonstrate the utility of our approach on the problems of (1) one-shot object recognition in a transfer-learning setting where we have no prior knowledge of the new classes, as well as (2) object-based one-shot scene recognition. As external data, we leverage 3D depth and pose information from the SUN RGB-D dataset. Our experiments show that attribute-guided augmentation of high-level CNN features considerably improves one-shot recognition performance on both problems.