Hierarchical Context Embedding for Region-based Object Detection

State-of-the-art two-stage object detectors apply a classifier to a sparse set of object proposals, relying on region-wise features extracted by RoIPool or RoIAlign as inputs. The region-wise features, in spite of aligning well with the proposal locations, may still lack the crucial context information which is necessary for filtering out noisy background detections, as well as recognizing objects possessing no distinctive appearances. To address this issue, we present a simple but effective Hierarchical Context Embedding (HCE) framework, which can be applied as a plug-and-play component, to facilitate the classification ability of a series of region-based detectors by mining contextual cues. Specifically, to advance the recognition of context-dependent object categories, we propose an image-level categorical embedding module which leverages the holistic image-level context to learn object-level concepts. Then, novel RoI features are generated by exploiting hierarchically embedded context information beneath both whole images and interested regions, which are also complementary to conventional RoI features. Moreover, to make full use of our hierarchical contextual RoI features, we propose the early-and-late fusion strategies (i.e., feature fusion and confidence fusion), which can be combined to boost the classification accuracy of region-based detectors. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our HCE framework is flexible and generalizable, leading to significant and consistent improvements upon various region-based detectors, including FPN, Cascade R-CNN and Mask R-CNN.

Learning Semantically Enhanced Feature for Fine-Grained Image Classification

We aim to provide a computationally cheap yet effective approach for fine-grained image classification (FGIC) in this letter. Unlike previous methods that rely on complex part localization modules, our approach learns fine-grained features by improving the semantics of sub-features of a global feature. Specifically, we first achieve the sub-feature semantic by arranging feature channels of a CNN into different groups through channel permutation. Meanwhile, to enhance the discriminability of sub-features, the groups are guided to be activated on object parts with strong discriminability by a weighted combination regularization. This process brings only 1.7% additional parameters to its ResNet-50 backbone. Moreover, our approach can be easily integrated into the backbone model as a plug-and-play module for end-to-end training with only image-level supervision. Experiments verified the effectiveness of our approach and validated its comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/cswluo/SEF

PyRetri: A PyTorch-based Library for Unsupervised Image Retrieval by Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Despite significant progress of applying deep learning methods to the field of content-based image retrieval, there has not been a software library that covers these methods in a unified manner. In order to fill this gap, we introduce PyRetri, an open source library for deep learning based unsupervised image retrieval. The library encapsulates the retrieval process in several stages and provides functionality that covers various prominent methods for each stage. The idea underlying its design is to provide a unified platform for deep learning based image retrieval research, with high usability and extensibility. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first open-source library for unsupervised image retrieval by deep learning.

Exploring Categorical Regularization for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

In this paper, we tackle the domain adaptive object detection problem, where the main challenge lies in significant domain gaps between source and target domains. Previous work seeks to plainly align image-level and instance-level shifts to eventually minimize the domain discrepancy. However, they still overlook to match crucial image regions and important instances across domains, which will strongly affect domain shift mitigation. In this work, we propose a simple but effective categorical regularization framework for alleviating this issue. It can be applied as a plug-and-play component on a series of Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN methods which are prominent for dealing with domain adaptive detection. Specifically, by integrating an image-level multi-label classifier upon the detection backbone, we can obtain the sparse but crucial image regions corresponding to categorical information, thanks to the weakly localization ability of the classification manner. Meanwhile, at the instance level, we leverage the categorical consistency between image-level predictions (by the classifier) and instance-level predictions (by the detection head) as a regularization factor to automatically hunt for the hard aligned instances of target domains. Extensive experiments of various domain shift scenarios show that our method obtains a significant performance gain over original Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN detectors. Furthermore, qualitative visualization and analyses can demonstrate the ability of our method for attending on the key regions/instances targeting on domain adaptation. Our code is open-source and available at \url{https://github.com/Megvii-Nanjing/CR-DA-DET}.

BBN: Bilateral-Branch Network with Cumulative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition

Our work focuses on tackling the challenging but natural visual recognition task of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes occupy most of the data, while most classes have rarely few samples). In the literature, class re-balancing strategies (e.g., re-weighting and re-sampling) are the prominent and effective methods proposed to alleviate the extreme imbalance for dealing with long-tailed problems. In this paper, we firstly discover that these re-balancing methods achieving satisfactory recognition accuracy owes to that they could significantly promote the classifier learning of deep networks. However, at the same time, they will unexpectedly damage the representative ability of the learned deep features to some extent. Therefore, we propose a unified Bilateral-Branch Network (BBN) to take care of both representation learning and classifier learning simultaneously, where each branch does perform its own duty separately. In particular, our BBN model is further equipped with a novel cumulative learning strategy, which is designed to first learn the universal patterns and then pay attention to the tail data gradually. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including the large-scale iNaturalist ones, justify that the proposed BBN can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, validation experiments can demonstrate both our preliminary discovery and effectiveness of tailored designs in BBN for long-tailed problems. Our method won the first place in the iNaturalist 2019 large scale species classification competition, and our code is open-source and available at https://github.com/Megvii-Nanjing/BBN.

Deep Learning for Fine-Grained Image Analysis: A Survey

Computer vision (CV) is the process of using machines to understand and analyze imagery, which is an integral branch of artificial intelligence. Among various research areas of CV, fine-grained image analysis (FGIA) is a longstanding and fundamental problem, and has become ubiquitous in diverse real-world applications. The task of FGIA targets analyzing visual objects from subordinate categories, \eg, species of birds or models of cars. The small inter-class variations and the large intra-class variations caused by the fine-grained nature makes it a challenging problem. During the booming of deep learning, recent years have witnessed remarkable progress of FGIA using deep learning techniques. In this paper, we aim to give a survey on recent advances of deep learning based FGIA techniques in a systematic way. Specifically, we organize the existing studies of FGIA techniques into three major categories: fine-grained image recognition, fine-grained image retrieval and fine-grained image generation. In addition, we also cover some other important issues of FGIA, such as publicly available benchmark datasets and its related domain specific applications. Finally, we conclude this survey by highlighting several directions and open problems which need be further explored by the community in the future.

Multi-Label Image Recognition with Graph Convolutional Networks

The task of multi-label image recognition is to predict a set of object labels that present in an image. As objects normally co-occur in an image, it is desirable to model the label dependencies to improve the recognition performance. To capture and explore such important dependencies, we propose a multi-label classification model based on Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). The model builds a directed graph over the object labels, where each node (label) is represented by word embeddings of a label, and GCN is learned to map this label graph into a set of inter-dependent object classifiers. These classifiers are applied to the image descriptors extracted by another sub-net, enabling the whole network to be end-to-end trainable. Furthermore, we propose a novel re-weighted scheme to create an effective label correlation matrix to guide information propagation among the nodes in GCN. Experiments on two multi-label image recognition datasets show that our approach obviously outperforms other existing state-of-the-art methods. In addition, visualization analyses reveal that the classifiers learned by our model maintain meaningful semantic topology.