OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SafetyNet: Detecting and Rejecting Adversarial Examples Robustly
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

We describe a method to produce a network where current methods such as DeepFool have great difficulty producing adversarial samples. Our construction suggests some insights into how deep networks work. We provide a reasonable analyses that our construction is difficult to defeat, and show experimentally that our method is hard to defeat with both Type I and Type II attacks using several standard networks and datasets. This SafetyNet architecture is used to an important and novel application SceneProof, which can reliably detect whether an image is a picture of a real scene or not. SceneProof applies to images captured with depth maps (RGBD images) and checks if a pair of image and depth map is consistent. It relies on the relative difficulty of producing naturalistic depth maps for images in post processing. We demonstrate that our SafetyNet is robust to adversarial examples built from currently known attacking approaches.
Recurrent Models for Situation Recognition
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

This work proposes Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models to predict structured 'image situations' -- actions and noun entities fulfilling semantic roles related to the action. In contrast to prior work relying on Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), we use a specialized action prediction network followed by an RNN for noun prediction. Our system obtains state-of-the-art accuracy on the challenging recent imSitu dataset, beating CRF-based models, including ones trained with additional data. Further, we show that specialized features learned from situation prediction can be transferred to the task of image captioning to more accurately describe human-object interactions.
Multi-Label Image Recognition by Recurrently Discovering Attentional Regions
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

This paper proposes a novel deep architecture to address multi-label image recognition, a fundamental and practical task towards general visual understanding. Current solutions for this task usually rely on an extra step of extracting hypothesis regions (i.e., region proposals), resulting in redundant computation and sub-optimal performance. In this work, we achieve the interpretable and contextualized multi-label image classification by developing a recurrent memorized-attention module. This module consists of two alternately performed components: i) a spatial transformer layer to locate attentional regions from the convolutional feature maps in a region-proposal-free way and ii) an LSTM (Long-Short Term Memory) sub-network to sequentially predict semantic labeling scores on the located regions while capturing the global dependencies of these regions. The LSTM also output the parameters for computing the spatial transformer. On large-scale benchmarks of multi-label image classification (e.g., MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC 07), our approach demonstrates superior performances over other existing state-of-the-arts in both accuracy and efficiency.
Visual Semantic Planning Using Deep Successor Representations
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

A crucial capability of real-world intelligent agents is their ability to plan a sequence of actions to achieve their goals in the visual world. In this work, we address the problem of visual semantic planning: the task of predicting a sequence of actions from visual observations that transform a dynamic environment from an initial state to a goal state. Doing so entails knowledge about objects and their affordances, as well as actions and their preconditions and effects. We propose learning these through interacting with a visual and dynamic environment. Our proposed solution involves bootstrapping reinforcement learning with imitation learning. To ensure cross task generalization, we develop a deep predictive model based on successor representations. Our experimental results show near optimal results across a wide range of tasks in the challenging THOR environment.
Neural Person Search Machines
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

We investigate the problem of person search in the wild in this work. Instead of comparing the query against all candidate regions generated in a query-blind manner, we propose to recursively shrink the search area from the whole image till achieving precise localization of the target person, by fully exploiting information from the query and contextual cues in every recursive search step. We develop the Neural Person Search Machines (NPSM) to implement such recursive localization for person search. Benefiting from its neural search mechanism, NPSM is able to selectively shrink its focus from a loose region to a tighter one containing the target automatically. In this process, NPSM employs an internal primitive memory component to memorize the query representation which modulates the attention and augments its robustness to other distracting regions. Evaluations on two benchmark datasets, CUHK-SYSU Person Search dataset and PRW dataset, have demonstrated that our method can outperform current state-of-the-arts in both mAP and top-1 evaluation protocols.
Show, Adapt and Tell: Adversarial Training of Cross-Domain Image Captioner
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Impressive image captioning results are achieved in domains with plenty of training image and sentence pairs (e.g., MSCOCO). However, transferring to a target domain with significant domain shifts but no paired training data (referred to as cross-domain image captioning) remains largely unexplored. We propose a novel adversarial training procedure to leverage unpaired data in the target domain. Two critic networks are introduced to guide the captioner, namely domain critic and multi-modal critic. The domain critic assesses whether the generated sentences are indistinguishable from sentences in the target domain. The multi-modal critic assesses whether an image and its generated sentence are a valid pair. During training, the critics and captioner act as adversaries -- captioner aims to generate indistinguishable sentences, whereas critics aim at distinguishing them. The assessment improves the captioner through policy gradient updates. During inference, we further propose a novel critic-based planning method to select high-quality sentences without additional supervision (e.g., tags). To evaluate, we use MSCOCO as the source domain and four other datasets (CUB-200-2011, Oxford-102, TGIF, and Flickr30k) as the target domains. Our method consistently performs well on all datasets. In particular, on CUB-200-2011, we achieve 21.8% CIDEr-D improvement after adaptation. Utilizing critics during inference further gives another 4.5% boost.
Attribute Recognition by Joint Recurrent Learning of Context and Correlation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Recognising semantic pedestrian attributes in surveillance images is a challenging task for computer vision, particularly when the imaging quality is poor with complex background clutter and uncontrolled viewing conditions, and the number of labelled training data is small. In this work, we formulate a Joint Recurrent Learning (JRL) model for exploring attribute context and correlation in order to improve attribute recognition given small sized training data with poor quality images. The JRL model learns jointly pedestrian attribute correlations in a pedestrian image and in particular their sequential ordering dependencies (latent high-order correlation) in an end-to-end encoder/decoder recurrent network. We demonstrate the performance advantage and robustness of the JRL model over a wide range of state-of-the-art deep models for pedestrian attribute recognition, multi-label image classification, and multi-person image annotation on two largest pedestrian attribute benchmarks PETA and RAP.
When Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Meets Tensor Representations
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Domain adaption (DA) allows machine learning methods trained on data sampled from one distribution to be applied to data sampled from another. It is thus of great practical importance to the application of such methods. Despite the fact that tensor representations are widely used in Computer Vision to capture multi-linear relationships that affect the data, most existing DA methods are applicable to vectors only. This renders them incapable of reflecting and preserving important structure in many problems. We thus propose here a learning-based method to adapt the source and target tensor representations directly, without vectorization. In particular, a set of alignment matrices is introduced to align the tensor representations from both domains into the invariant tensor subspace. These alignment matrices and the tensor subspace are modeled as a joint optimization problem and can be learned adaptively from the data using the proposed alternative minimization scheme. Extensive experiments show that our approach is capable of preserving the discriminative power of the source domain, of resisting the effects of label noise, and works effectively for small sample sizes, and even one-shot DA. We show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on the task of cross-domain visual recognition in both efficacy and efficiency, and particularly that it outperforms all comparators when applied to DA of the convolutional activations of deep convolutional networks.
Look, Listen and Learn
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

We consider the question: what can be learnt by looking at and listening to a large number of unlabelled videos? There is a valuable, but so far untapped, source of information contained in the video itself -- the correspondence between the visual and the audio streams, and we introduce a novel "Audio-Visual Correspondence" learning task that makes use of this. Training visual and audio networks from scratch, without any additional supervision other than the raw unconstrained videos themselves, is shown to successfully solve this task, and, more interestingly, result in good visual and audio representations. These features set the new state-of-the-art on two sound classification benchmarks, and perform on par with the state-of-the-art self-supervised approaches on ImageNet classification. We also demonstrate that the network is able to localize objects in both modalities, as well as perform fine-grained recognition tasks.
Image-Based Localization Using LSTMs for Structured Feature Correlation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

In this work we propose a new CNN+LSTM architecture for camera pose regression for indoor and outdoor scenes. CNNs allow us to learn suitable feature representations for localization that are robust against motion blur and illumination changes. We make use of LSTM units on the CNN output, which play the role of a structured dimensionality reduction on the feature vector, leading to drastic improvements in localization performance. We provide extensive quantitative comparison of CNN-based and SIFT-based localization methods, showing the weaknesses and strengths of each. Furthermore, we present a new large-scale indoor dataset with accurate ground truth from a laser scanner. Experimental results on both indoor and outdoor public datasets show our method outperforms existing deep architectures, and can localize images in hard conditions, e.g., in the presence of mostly textureless surfaces, where classic SIFT-based methods fail.
Predicting Deeper Into the Future of Semantic Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

The ability to predict and therefore to anticipate the future is an important attribute of intelligence. It is also of utmost importance in real-time systems, e.g. in robotics or autonomous driving, which depend on visual scene understanding for decision making. While prediction of the raw RGB pixel values in future video frames has been studied in previous work, here we introduce the novel task of predicting semantic segmentations of future frames. Given a sequence of video frames, our goal is to predict segmentation maps of not yet observed video frames that lie up to a second or further in the future. We develop an autoregressive convolutional neural network that learns to iteratively generate multiple frames. Our results on the Cityscapes dataset show that directly predicting future segmentations is substantially better than predicting and then segmenting future RGB frames. Prediction results up to half a second in the future are visually convincing and are much more accurate than those of a baseline based on warping semantic segmentations using optical flow.
Coordinating Filters for Faster Deep Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Very large-scale Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable successes in a large variety of computer vision tasks. However, the high computation intensity of DNNs makes it challenging to deploy these models on resource-limited systems. Some studies used low-rank approaches that approximate the filters by low-rank basis to accelerate the testing. Those works directly decomposed the pre-trained DNNs by Low-Rank Approximations (LRA). How to train DNNs toward lower-rank space for more efficient DNNs, however, remains as an open area. To solve the issue, in this work, we propose Force Regularization, which uses attractive forces to enforce filters so as to coordinate more weight information into lower-rank space. We mathematically and empirically verify that after applying our technique, standard LRA methods can reconstruct filters using much lower basis and thus result in faster DNNs. The effectiveness of our approach is comprehensively evaluated in ResNets, AlexNet, and GoogLeNet. In AlexNet, for example, Force Regularization gains 2x speedup on modern GPU without accuracy loss and 4.05x speedup on CPU by paying small accuracy degradation. Moreover, Force Regularization better initializes the low-rank DNNs such that the fine-tuning can converge faster toward higher accuracy. The obtained lower-rank DNNs can be further sparsified, proving that Force Regularization can be integrated with state-of-the-art sparsity-based acceleration methods. Source code is available in https://github.com/wenwei202/caffe
Unsupervised Representation Learning by Sorting Sequences
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

We present an unsupervised representation learning approach using videos without semantic labels. We leverage the temporal coherence as a supervisory signal by formulating representation learning as a sequence sorting task. We take temporally shuffled frames (i.e., in non-chronological order) as inputs and train a convolutional neural network to sort the shuffled sequences. Similar to comparison-based sorting algorithms, we propose to extract features from all frame pairs and aggregate them to predict the correct order. As sorting shuffled image sequence requires an understanding of the statistical temporal structure of images, training with such a proxy task allows us to learn rich and generalizable visual representation. We validate the effectiveness of the learned representation using our method as pre-training on high-level recognition problems. The experimental results show that our method compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods on action recognition, image classification and object detection tasks.
SegFlow: Joint Learning for Video Object Segmentation and Optical Flow
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

This paper proposes an end-to-end trainable network, SegFlow, for simultaneously predicting pixel-wise object segmentation and optical flow in videos. The proposed SegFlow has two branches where useful information of object segmentation and optical flow is propagated bidirectionally in a unified framework. The segmentation branch is based on a fully convolutional network, which has been proved effective in image segmentation task, and the optical flow branch takes advantage of the FlowNet model. The unified framework is trained iteratively offline to learn a generic notion, and fine-tuned online for specific objects. Extensive experiments on both the video object segmentation and optical flow datasets demonstrate that introducing optical flow improves the performance of segmentation and vice versa, against the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Dense-Captioning Events in Videos
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Most natural videos contain numerous events. For example, in a video of a "man playing a piano", the video might also contain "another man dancing" or "a crowd clapping". We introduce the task of dense-captioning events, which involves both detecting and describing events in a video. We propose a new model that is able to identify all events in a single pass of the video while simultaneously describing the detected events with natural language. Our model introduces a variant of an existing proposal module that is designed to capture both short as well as long events that span minutes. To capture the dependencies between the events in a video, our model introduces a new captioning module that uses contextual information from past and future events to jointly describe all events. We also introduce ActivityNet Captions, a large-scale benchmark for dense-captioning events. ActivityNet Captions contains 20k videos amounting to 849 video hours with 100k total descriptions, each with it's unique start and end time. Finally, we report performances of our model for dense-captioning events, video retrieval and localization.
Learning Long-Term Dependencies for Action Recognition With a Biologically-Inspired Deep Network
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Despite a lot of research efforts devoted in recent years, how to efficiently learn long-term dependencies from sequences still remains a pretty challenging task. As one of the key models for sequence learning, recurrent neural network (RNN) and its variants such as long short term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) are still not powerful enough in practice. One possible reason is that they have only feedforward connections, which is different from the biological neural system that is typically composed of both feedforward and feedback connections. To address this problem, this paper proposes a biologically-inspired deep network, called shuttleNet\footnote{Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/shiyemin/shuttlenet}}. Technologically, the shuttleNet consists of several processors, each of which is a GRU while associated with multiple groups of cells and states. Unlike traditional RNNs, all processors inside shuttleNet are loop connected to mimic the brain's feedforward and feedback connections, in which they are shared across multiple pathways in the loop connection. Attention mechanism is then employed to select the best information flow pathway. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets (i.e UCF101 and HMDB51) show that we can beat state-of-the-art methods by simply embedding shuttleNet into a CNN-RNN framework.
Deep Direct Regression for Multi-Oriented Scene Text Detection
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we first provide a new perspective to divide existing high performance object detection methods into direct and indirect regressions. Direct regression performs boundary regression by predicting the offsets from a given point, while indirect regression predicts the offsets from some bounding box proposals. Then we analyze the drawbacks of the indirect regression, which the recent state-of-the-art detection structures like Faster-RCNN and SSD follows, for multi-oriented scene text detection, and point out the potential superiority of direct regression. To verify this point of view, we propose a deep direct regression based method for multi-oriented scene text detection. Our detection framework is simple and effective with a fully convolutional network and one-step post processing. The fully convolutional network is optimized in an end-to-end way and has bi-task outputs where one is pixel-wise classification between text and non-text, and the other is direct regression to determine the vertex coordinates of quadrilateral text boundaries. The proposed method is particularly beneficial for localizing incidental scene texts. On the ICDAR2015 Incidental Scene Text benchmark, our method achieves the F1-measure of 81%, which is a new state-of-the-art and significantly outperforms previous approaches. On other standard datasets with focused scene texts, our method also reaches the state-of-the-art performance.
FoveaNet: Perspective-Aware Urban Scene Parsing
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Parsing urban scene images benefits many applications, especially self-driving. Most of the current solutions employ generic image parsing models that treat all scales and locations in the images equally and do not consider the geometry property of car-captured urban scene images. Thus, they suffer from heterogeneous object scales caused by perspective projection of cameras on actual scenes and inevitably encounter parsing failures on distant objects as well as other boundary and recognition errors. In this work, we propose a new FoveaNet model to fully exploit the perspective geometry of scene images and address the common failures of generic parsing models. FoveaNet estimates the perspective geometry of a scene image through a convolutional network which integrates supportive evidence from contextual objects within the image. Based on the perspective geometry information, FoveaNet "undoes" the camera perspective projection analyzing regions in the space of the actual scene, and thus provides much more reliable parsing results. Furthermore, to effectively address the recognition errors, FoveaNet introduces a new dense CRFs model that takes the perspective geometry as a prior potential. We evaluate FoveaNet on two urban scene parsing datasets, Cityspaces and CamVid, which demonstrates that FoveaNet can outperform all the well-established baselines and provide new state-of-the-art performance.
Beyond Planar Symmetry: Modeling Human Perception of Reflection and Rotation Symmetries in the Wild
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Humans take advantage of real world symmetries for various tasks, yet capturing their superb symmetry perception mechanism with a computational model remains elusive. Motivated by a new study demonstrating the extremely high inter-person accuracy of human perceived symmetries in the wild, we have constructed the first deep-learning neural network for reflection and rotation symmetry detection (Sym-NET), trained on photos from MS-COCO (Microsoft-Common Object in COntext) dataset with nearly 11K consistent symmetry-labels from more than 400 human observers. We employ novel methods to convert discrete human labels into symmetry heatmaps, capture symmetry densely in an image and quantitatively evaluate Sym-NET against multiple existing computer vision algorithms. On CVPR 2013 symmetry competition testsets and unseen MS-COCO photos, Sym-NET significantly outperforms all other competitors. Beyond mathematically well-defined symmetries on a plane, Sym-NET demonstrates abilities to identify viewpoint-varied 3D symmetries, partially occluded symmetrical objects, and symmetries at a semantic level.