mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Attention-Guided Unified Network for Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Yanwei Li, Xinze Chen, Zheng Zhu, Lingxi Xie, Guan Huang, Dalong Du, Xingang Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper studies panoptic segmentation, a recently proposed task which segments foreground (FG) objects at the instance level as well as background (BG) contents at the semantic level. Existing methods mostly dealt with these two problems separately, but in this paper, we reveal the underlying relationship between them, in particular, FG objects provide complementary cues to assist BG understanding. Our approach, named the Attention-guided Unified Network (AUNet), is a unified framework with two branches for FG and BG segmentation simultaneously. Two sources of attentions are added to the BG branch, namely, RPN and FG segmentation mask to provide object-level and pixel-level attentions, respectively. Our approach is generalized to different backbones with consistent accuracy gain in both FG and BG segmentation, and also sets new state-of-the-arts both in the MS-COCO (46.5% PQ) and Cityscapes (59.0% PQ)  benchmarks.
NAS-FPN: Learning Scalable Feature Pyramid Architecture for Object Detection
Authors: Golnaz Ghiasi, Tsung-Yi Lin, Quoc V. Le
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Current state-of-the-art convolutional architectures for object detection are manually designed. Here we aim to learn a better architecture of feature pyramid network for object detection. We adopt Neural Architecture Search and discover a new feature pyramid architecture in a novel scalable search space covering all cross-scale connections. The discovered architecture, named NAS-FPN, consists of a combination of top-down and bottom-up connections to fuse features across scales. NAS-FPN, combined with various backbone models in the RetinaNet framework, achieves better accuracy and latency tradeoff compared to state-of-the-art object detection models. NAS-FPN improves mobile detection accuracy by 2 AP compared to state-of-the-art SSDLite with MobileNetV2 model in [32] and achieves 48.3 AP which surpasses Mask R-CNN [10] detection accuracy with less computation time.
OICSR: Out-In-Channel Sparsity Regularization for Compact Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Jiashi Li, Qi Qi, Jingyu Wang, Ce Ge, Yujian Li, Zhangzhang Yue, Haifeng Sun
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Channel pruning can significantly accelerate and compress deep neural networks. Many channel pruning works utilize structured sparsity regularization to zero out all the weights in some channels and automatically obtain structure-sparse network in training stage. However, these methods apply structured sparsity regularization on each layer separately where the correlations between consecutive layers are omitted. In this paper, we first combine one out-channel in current layer and the corresponding in-channel in next layer as a regularization group, namely out-in-channel. Our proposed Out-In-Channel Sparsity Regularization (OICSR) considers correlations between successive layers to further retain predictive power of the compact network. Training with OICSR thoroughly transfers discriminative features into a fraction of out-in-channels. Correspondingly, OICSR measures channel importance based on statistics computed from two consecutive layers, not individual layer. Finally, a global greedy pruning algorithm is designed to remove redundant out-in-channels in an iterative way. Our method is comprehensively evaluated with various CNN architectures including CifarNet, AlexNet, ResNet, DenseNet and PreActSeNet on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1K datasets. Notably, on ImageNet-1K, we reduce 37.2% FLOPs on ResNet-50 while outperforming the original model by 0.22% top-1 accuracy.
Semantically Aligned Bias Reducing Zero Shot Learning
Authors: Akanksha Paul, Narayanan C. Krishnan, Prateek Munjal
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Zero shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen classes by exploiting semantic relationships between seen and unseen classes. Two major problems faced by ZSL algorithms are the hubness problem and the bias towards the seen classes. Existing ZSL methods focus on only one of these problems in the conventional and generalized ZSL setting. In this work, we propose a novel approach, Semantically Aligned Bias Reducing (SABR) ZSL, which focuses on solving both the problems. It overcomes the hubness problem by learning a latent space that preserves the semantic relationship between the labels while encoding the discriminating information about the classes.  Further, we also propose ways to reduce bias of the seen classes through a simple cross-validation process in the inductive setting and a novel weak transfer constraint in the transductive setting.  Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets suggest that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms by  1.5-9% in the conventional ZSL setting and by  2-14% in the generalized ZSL for both the inductive and transductive settings.
Feature Space Perturbations Yield More Transferable Adversarial Examples
Authors: Nathan Inkawhich, Wei Wen, Hai (Helen) Li, Yiran Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Many recent works have shown that deep learning models are vulnerable to quasi-imperceptible input perturbations, yet practitioners cannot fully explain this behavior. This work describes a transfer-based blackbox targeted adversarial attack of deep feature space representations that also provides insights into cross-model class representations of deep CNNs. The attack is explicitly designed for transferability and drives feature space representation of a source image at layer L towards the representation of a target image at L. The attack yields highly transferable targeted examples, which outperform competition winning methods by over 30% in targeted attack metrics. We also show the choice of L to generate examples from is important, transferability characteristics are blackbox model agnostic, and indicate that well trained deep models have similar highly-abstract representations.
IGE-Net: Inverse Graphics Energy Networks for Human Pose Estimation and Single-View Reconstruction
Authors: Dominic Jack, Frederic Maire, Sareh Shirazi, Anders Eriksson
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Inferring 3D scene information from 2D observations is an open problem in computer vision. We propose using a deep-learning based energy minimization framework to learn a consistency measure between 2D observations and a proposed world model, and demonstrate that this framework can be trained end-to-end to produce consistent and realistic inferences. We evaluate the framework on human pose estimation and voxel-based object reconstruction benchmarks and show competitive results can be achieved with relatively shallow networks with drastically fewer learned parameters and floating point operations than conventional deep-learning approaches.
Knowledge Distillation via Instance Relationship Graph
Authors: Yufan Liu, Jiajiong Cao, Bing Li, Chunfeng Yuan, Weiming Hu, Yangxi Li, Yunqiang Duan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The key challenge of knowledge distillation is to extract general, moderate and sufficient knowledge from a teacher network to guide a student network. In this paper, a novel Instance Relationship Graph (IRG) is proposed for knowledge distillation. It models three kinds of knowledge, including instance features, instance relationships and feature space transformation, while the latter two kinds of knowledge are neglected by previous methods. Firstly, the IRG is constructed  to model the distilled knowledge of one network layer, by considering instance features and instance relationships as vertexes and edges respectively. Secondly, an IRG transformation is proposed to models the feature space transformation across layers. It is more moderate than directly mimicking the features at intermediate layers. Finally, hint loss functions are designed to force a student's IRGs to mimic the structures of a teacher's IRGs. The proposed method effectively captures the knowledge along the whole network via IRGs, and thus shows stable convergence and strong robustness to different network architectures. In addition, the proposed method shows superior performance over existing methods on datasets of various scales.
PPGNet: Learning Point-Pair Graph for Line Segment Detection
Authors: Ziheng Zhang, Zhengxin Li, Ning Bi, Jia Zheng, Jinlei Wang, Kun Huang, Weixin Luo, Yanyu Xu, Shenghua Gao
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel framework to detect line segments in man-made environments. Specifically, we propose to describe junctions, line segments and relationships between them with a simple graph, which is more structured and informative than end-point representation used in existing line segment detection methods. In order to extract a line segment graph from an image, we further introduce the PPGNet, a convolutional neural network that directly infers a graph from an image. We evaluate our method on published benchmarks including York Urban and Wireframe datasets. The results demonstrate that our method achieves satisfactory performance and generalizes well on all the benchmarks. The source code of our work is available at https://github.com/svip-lab/PPGNet.
Building Detail-Sensitive Semantic Segmentation Networks With Polynomial Pooling
Authors: Zhen Wei, Jingyi Zhang, Li Liu, Fan Zhu, Fumin Shen, Yi Zhou, Si Liu, Yao Sun, Ling Shao
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Semantic segmentation is an important computer vision task, which aims to allocate a semantic label to each pixel in an image. When training a segmentation model, it is common to fine-tune a classification network pre-trained on a large-scale dataset. However, as an intrinsic property of the classification model, invariance to spatial perturbation resulting from the lose of detail-sensitivity prevents segmentation networks from achieving high performance. The use of standard poolings is one of the key factors for this invariance. The most common standard poolings are max and average pooling. Max pooling can increase both the invariance to spatial perturbations and the non-linearity of the networks. Average pooling, on the other hand, is sensitive to spatial perturbations, but is a linear function. For semantic segmentation, we prefer both the preservation of detailed cues within a local feature region and non-linearity that increases a network's functional complexity. In this work, we propose a polynomial pooling (P-pooling) function that finds an intermediate form between max and average pooling to provide an optimally balanced and self-adjusted pooling strategy for semantic segmentation. The P-pooling is differentiable and can be applied into a variety of pre-trained networks. Extensive studies on the PASCAL VOC, Cityscapes and ADE20k datasets demonstrate the superiority of P-pooling over other poolings. Experiments on various network architectures and state-of-the-art training strategies also show that models with P-pooling layers consistently outperform those directly fine-tuned using pre-trained classification models.
Variational Bayesian Dropout With a Hierarchical Prior
Authors: Yuhang Liu, Wenyong Dong, Lei Zhang, Dong Gong, Qinfeng Shi
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Variational dropout (VD) is a generalization of Gaussian dropout, which aims at inferring the posterior of network weights based on a log-uniform prior on them to learn these weights as well as dropout rate simultaneously. The log-uniform prior not only interprets the regularization capacity of Gaussian dropout in network training, but also underpins the inference of such posterior. However, the log-uniform prior is an improper prior (i.e., its integral is infinite), which causes the inference of posterior to be ill-posed, thus restricting the regularization performance of VD. To address this problem, we present a new generalization of Gaussian dropout, termed variational Bayesian dropout (VBD), which turns to exploit a hierarchical prior on the network weights and infer a new joint posterior. Specifically, we implement the hierarchical prior as a zero-mean Gaussian distribution with variance sampled from a uniform hyper-prior. Then, we incorporate such a prior into inferring the joint posterior over network weights and the variance in the hierarchical prior, with which both the network training and dropout rate estimation can be cast into a joint optimization problem. More importantly, the hierarchical prior is a proper prior which enables the inference of posterior to be well-posed. In addition, we further show that the proposed VBD can be seamlessly applied to network compression. Experiments on classification and network compression demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed VBD in regularizing network training.
AANet: Attribute Attention Network for Person Re-Identifications
Authors: Chiat-Pin Tay, Sharmili Roy, Kim-Hui Yap
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper proposes Attribute Attention Network (AANet), a new architecture that integrates person attributes and attribute attention maps into a classification framework to solve the person re-identification (re-ID) problem. Many person re-ID models typically employ semantic cues such as body parts or human pose to improve the re-ID performance. Attribute information, however, is often not utilized. The proposed AANet leverages on a baseline model that uses body parts and integrates the key attribute information in an unified learning framework. The AANet consists of a global person ID task, a part detection task and a crucial attribute detection task. By estimating the class responses of individual attributes and combining them to form the attribute attention map (AAM), a very strong discriminatory representation is constructed. The proposed AANet outperforms the best state-of-the-art method [??] using ResNet-50 by 3.36% in mAP and 3.12% in Rank-1 accuracy on DukeMTMC-reID dataset. On Market1501 dataset, AANet achieves 92.38% mAP and 95.10% Rank-1 accuracy with re-ranking,  outperforming [??], another state of the art method using ResNet-152, by 1.42% in mAP and 0.47% in Rank-1 accuracy. In addition, AANet can perform person attribute prediction (e.g., gender, hair length, clothing length etc.), and localize the attributes in the query image.
Overcoming Limitations of Mixture Density Networks: A Sampling and Fitting Framework for Multimodal Future Prediction
Authors: Osama Makansi, Eddy Ilg, Ozgun Cicek, Thomas Brox
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Future prediction is a fundamental principle of intelligence that helps plan actions and avoid possible dangers. As the future is uncertain to a large extent, modeling the uncertainty and multimodality of the future states is of great relevance. Existing approaches are rather limited in this regard and mostly yield a single hypothesis of the future or, at the best, strongly constrained mixture components that suffer from instabilities in training and mode collapse. In this work, we present an approach that involves the prediction of several samples of the future with a winner-takes-all loss and iterative grouping of samples to multiple modes. Moreover, we discuss how to evaluate predicted multimodal distributions, including the common real scenario, where only a single sample from the ground-truth distribution is available for evaluation. We show on synthetic and real data that the proposed approach triggers good estimates of multimodal distributions and avoids mode collapse.
A Main/Subsidiary Network Framework for Simplifying Binary Neural Networks
Authors: Yinghao Xu, Xin Dong, Yudian Li, Hao Su
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: To reduce memory footprint and run-time latency, techniques such as neural net-work pruning and binarization have been explored separately.  However, it is un-clear how to combine the best of the two worlds to get extremely small and efficient models.  In this paper, we, for the first time, define the filter-level pruning problem for binary neural networks, which cannot be solved by simply migrating existing structural pruning methods for full-precision models.  A novel learning-based approach is proposed to prune filters in our main/subsidiary network frame-work, where the main network is responsible for learning representative features to optimize the prediction performance, and the subsidiary component works as a filter selector on the main network. To avoid gradient mismatch when training the subsidiary component, we propose a layer-wise and bottom-up scheme.  We also provide the theoretical and experimental comparison between our learning-based and greedy rule-based methods.  Finally, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach applied on several binary models,  including binarizedNIN, VGG-11, and ResNet-18, on various image classification datasets.  For bi-nary ResNet-18 on ImageNet, we use 78.6% filters but can achieve slightly better test error 49.87% (50.02%-0.15%) than the original model
PointNetLK: Robust & Efficient Point Cloud Registration Using PointNet
Authors: Yasuhiro Aoki, Hunter Goforth, Rangaprasad Arun Srivatsan, Simon Lucey
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: PointNet has revolutionized how we think about representing point clouds. For classification and segmentation tasks, the approach and its subsequent variants/extensions are considered state-of-the-art. To date, the successful application of PointNet to point cloud registration has remained elusive. In this paper we argue that PointNet itself can be thought of as a learnable "imaging" function. As a consequence, classical vision algorithms for image alignment can be brought to bear on the problem -- namely the Lucas & Kanade (LK) algorithm. Our central innovations stem from: (i) how to modify the LK algorithm to accommodate the PointNet imaging function, and (ii) unrolling PointNet and the LK algorithm into a single trainable recurrent deep neural network. We describe the architecture, and compare its performance against state-of-the-art in several common registration scenarios. The architecture offers some remarkable properties including: generalization across shape categories and computational efficiency -- opening up new paths of exploration for the application of deep learning to point cloud registration. Code and videos are available at https://github.com/hmgoforth/PointNetLK.
Few-Shot Adaptive Faster R-CNN
Authors: Tao Wang, Xiaopeng Zhang, Li Yuan, Jiashi Feng
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: To mitigate the detection performance drop caused by domain shift, we aim to develop a novel few-shot adaptation approach that requires only a few target domain images with limited bounding box annotations. To this end, we first observe several significant challenges. First, the target domain data is highly insufficient, making most existing domain adaptation methods ineffective. Second, object detection involves simultaneous localization and classification, further complicating the model adaptation process. Third, the model suffers from over-adaptation (similar to overfitting when training with a few data example) and instability risk that may lead to degraded detection performance in the target domain. To address these challenges, we first introduce a pairing mechanism over source and target features to alleviate the issue of insufficient target domain samples. We then propose a bi-level module to adapt the source trained detector to the target domain: 1) the split pooling based image level adaptation module uniformly extracts and aligns paired local patch features over locations, with different scale and aspect ratio; 2) the instance level adaptation module semantically aligns paired object features while avoids inter-class confusion. Meanwhile, a source model feature regularization (SMFR) is applied to stabilize the adaptation process of the two modules. Combining these contributions gives a novel few-shot adaptive Faster-RCNN framework, termed FAFRCNN, which effectively adapts to target domain with a few labeled samples. Experiments with multiple datasets show that our model achieves new state-of-the-art performance under both the interested few-shot domain adaptation(FDA) and unsupervised domain adaptation(UDA) setting.
VRSTC: Occlusion-Free Video Person Re-Identification
Authors: Ruibing Hou, Bingpeng Ma, Hong Chang, Xinqian Gu, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Video person re-identification (re-ID) plays an important role in surveillance video analysis. However, the performance of video re-ID degenerates severely under partial occlusion. In this paper, we propose a novel network, called Spatio-Temporal Completion network (STCnet), to explicitly handle partial occlusion problem. Different from most previous works that discard the occluded frames, STCnet can recover the appearance of the occluded parts. For one thing, the spatial structure of a pedestrian frame can be used to predict the occluded body parts from the unoccluded body parts of this frame. For another, the temporal patterns of pedestrian sequence provide important clues to generate the contents of occluded parts. With the spatio-temporal information, STCnet can recover the appearance for the occluded parts, which could be leveraged with those unoccluded parts for more accurate video re-ID. By combining a re-ID network with STCnet, a video re-ID framework robust to partial occlusion (VRSTC) is proposed. Experiments on three challenging video re-ID databases demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-arts.
Compact Feature Learning for Multi-Domain Image Classification
Authors: Yajing Liu, Xinmei Tian, Ya Li, Zhiwei Xiong, Feng Wu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The goal of multi-domain learning is to improve the performance over multiple domains by making full use of all training data from them. However, variations of feature distributions across different domains result in a non-trivial solution of multi-domain learning. The state-of-the-art work regarding multi-domain classification aims to extract domain-invariant features and domain-specific features independently. However, they view the distributions of features from different classes as a general distribution and try to match these distributions across domains, which lead to the mixture of features from different classes across domains and degrade the performance of classification. Additionally, existing works only force the shared features among domains to be orthogonal to the features in the domain-specific network. However, redundant features between the domain-specific networks still remain, which may shrink the discriminative ability of domain-specific features. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end network to obtain the more optimal features, which we call compact features. We propose to extract the domain-invariant features by matching the joint distributions of different domains, which have dis- tinct boundaries between different classes. Moreover, we add an orthogonal constraint between the private features across domains to ensure the discriminative ability of the domain-specific space. The proposed method is validated on three landmark datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Adaptive Transfer Network for Cross-Domain Person Re-Identification
Authors: Jiawei Liu, Zheng-Jun Zha, Di Chen, Richang Hong, Meng Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Recent deep learning based person re-identification approaches have steadily improved the performance for benchmarks, however they often fail to generalize well from one domain to another. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive transfer network (ATNet) for effective cross-domain person re-identification. ATNet looks into the essential causes of domain gap and addresses it following the principle of "divide-and-conquer".  It decomposes the complicated cross-domain transfer into a set of factor-wise sub-transfers, each of which concentrates on style transfer with respect to a certain imaging factor, e.g., illumination, resolution and camera view etc. An adaptive ensemble strategy is proposed to fuse factor-wise transfers by perceiving the affect magnitudes of various factors on images. Such "decomposition-and-ensemble" strategy gives ATNet the capability of precise style transfer at factor level and eventually effective transfer across domains. In particular, ATNet consists of a transfer network composed by multiple factor-wise CycleGANs and an ensemble CycleGAN as well as a selection network that infers the affects of different factors on transferring each image. Extensive experimental results on  three widely-used datasets, i.e., Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID and PRID2011 have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed ATNet with significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods.
Large-Scale Few-Shot Learning: Knowledge Transfer With Class Hierarchy
Authors: Aoxue Li, Tiange Luo, Zhiwu Lu, Tao Xiang, Liwei Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Recently, large-scale few-shot learning (FSL) becomes topical. It is discovered that, for a large-scale FSL problem with 1,000 classes in the source domain, a strong baseline emerges, that is, simply training a deep feature embedding model using the aggregated source classes and performing nearest neighbor (NN) search using the learned features on the target classes. The state-of-the-art large-scale FSL methods struggle to beat this baseline, indicating intrinsic limitations on scalability. To overcome the challenge, we propose a novel large-scale FSL model by learning transferable visual features with the class hierarchy which encodes the semantic relations between source and target classes. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model significantly outperforms not only the NN baseline but also the state-of-the-art alternatives. Furthermore, we show that the proposed model can be easily extended to the large-scale zero-shot learning (ZSL) problem and also achieves the state-of-the-art results.
Moving Object Detection Under Discontinuous Change in Illumination Using Tensor Low-Rank and Invariant Sparse Decomposition
Authors: Moein Shakeri, Hong Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Although low-rank and sparse decomposition based methods have been successfully applied to the problem of moving object detection using structured sparsity-inducing norms, they are still vulnerable to significant illumination changes that arise in certain applications. We are interested in moving object detection in applications involving time-lapse image sequences for which current methods mistakenly group moving objects and illumination changes into foreground. Our method relies on the multilinear (tensor) data low-rank and sparse decomposition framework to address the weaknesses of existing methods. The key to our proposed method is to create first a set of prior maps that can characterize the changes in the image sequence due to illumination. We show that they can be detected by a k-support norm. To deal with concurrent, two types of changes, we employ two regularization terms, one for detecting moving objects and the other for accounting for illumination changes, in the tensor low-rank and sparse decomposition formulation. Through comprehensive experiments using challenging datasets, we show that our method demonstrates a remarkable ability to detect moving objects under discontinuous change in illumination, and outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions to this challenging problem.
Pedestrian Detection With Autoregressive Network Phases
Authors: Garrick Brazil, Xiaoming Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We present an autoregressive pedestrian detection framework with cascaded phases designed to progressively improve precision. The proposed framework utilizes a novel lightweight stackable decoder-encoder module which uses convolutional re-sampling layers to improve features while maintaining efficient memory and runtime cost. Unlike previous cascaded detection systems, our proposed framework is designed within a region proposal network and thus retains greater context of nearby detections compared to independently processed RoI systems. We explicitly encourage increasing levels of precision by assigning strict labeling policies to each consecutive phase such that early phases develop features primarily focused on achieving high recall and later on accurate precision. In consequence, the final feature maps form more peaky radial gradients emulating from the centroids of unique pedestrians. Using our proposed autoregressive framework leads to new state-of-the-art performance on the reasonable and occlusion settings of the Caltech pedestrian dataset, and achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI dataset.
All You Need Is a Few Shifts: Designing Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Classification
Authors: Weijie Chen, Di Xie, Yuan Zhang, Shiliang Pu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Shift operation is an efficient alternative over depthwise separable convolution. However, it is still bottlenecked by its implementation manner, namely memory movement. To put this direction forward, a new and novel basic component named Sparse Shift Layer (SSL) is introduced in this paper to construct efficient convolutional neural networks. In this family of architectures, the basic block is only composed by 1x1 convolutional layers with only a few shift operations applied to the intermediate feature maps. To make this idea feasible, we introduce shift operation penalty during optimization and further propose a quantization-aware shift learning method to impose the learned displacement more friendly for inference. Extensive ablation studies indicate that only a few shift operations are sufficient to provide spatial information communication. Furthermore, to maximize the role of SSL, we redesign an improved network architecture to Fully Exploit the limited capacity of neural Network (FE-Net). Equipped with SSL, this network can achieve 75.0% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with only 563M M-Adds. It surpasses other counterparts constructed by depthwise separable convolution and the networks searched by NAS in terms of accuracy and practical speed.
Stochastic Class-Based Hard Example Mining for Deep Metric Learning
Authors: Yumin Suh, Bohyung Han, Wonsik Kim, Kyoung Mu Lee
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Performance of deep metric learning depends heavily on the capability of mining hard negative examples during training.  However, many metric learning algorithms often require intractable computational cost due to frequent feature computations and nearest neighbor searches in a large-scale dataset. As a result, existing approaches often suffer from trade-off between training speed and prediction accuracy. To alleviate this limitation, we propose a stochastic hard negative mining method. Our key idea is to adopt class signatures that keep track of feature embedding online with minor additional cost during training, and identify hard negative example candidates using the signatures. Given an anchor instance, our algorithm first selects a few hard negative classes based on the class-to-sample distances and then performs a refined search in an instance-level only from the selected classes. As most of the classes are discarded at the first step, it is much more efficient than exhaustive search while effectively mining a large number of hard examples. Our experiment shows that the proposed technique improves image retrieval accuracy substantially; it achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the several standard benchmark datasets.
Revisiting Local Descriptor Based Image-To-Class Measure for Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Wenbin Li, Lei Wang, Jinglin Xu, Jing Huo, Yang Gao, Jiebo Luo
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Few-shot learning in image classification aims to learn a classifier to classify images when only few training examples are available for each class. Recent work has achieved promising classification performance, where an image-level feature based measure is usually used. In this paper, we argue that a measure at such a level may not be effective enough in light of the scarcity of examples in few-shot learning. Instead, we think a local descriptor based image-to-class measure should be taken, inspired by its surprising success in the heydays of local invariant features. Specifically, building upon the recent episodic training mechanism, we propose a Deep Nearest Neighbor Neural Network (DN4 in short) and train it in an end-to-end manner. Its key difference from the literature is the replacement of the image-level feature based measure in the final layer by a local descriptor based image-to-class measure. This measure is conducted online via a k-nearest neighbor search over the deep local descriptors of convolutional feature maps. The proposed DN4 not only learns the optimal deep local descriptors for the image-to-class measure, but also utilizes the higher efficiency of such a measure in the case of example scarcity, thanks to the exchangeability of visual patterns across the images in the same class. Our work leads to a simple, effective, and computationally efficient framework for few-shot learning. Experimental study on benchmark datasets consistently shows its superiority over the related state-of-the-art, with the largest absolute improvement of 17% over the next best. The source code can be available from https://github.com/WenbinLee/DN4.git.
Towards Robust Curve Text Detection With Conditional Spatial Expansion
Authors: Zichuan Liu, Guosheng Lin, Sheng Yang, Fayao Liu, Weisi Lin, Wang Ling Goh
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: It is challenging to detect curve texts due to their irregular shapes and varying sizes. In this paper, we first investigate the deficiency of the existing curve detection methods and then propose a novel Conditional Spatial Expansion (CSE) mechanism to improve the performance of curve detection. Instead of regarding the curve text detection as a polygon regression or a segmentation problem, we formulate it as a sequence prediction on the spatial domain. CSE starts with a seed arbitrarily chosen within a text region and progressively merges neighborhood regions based on the extracted local features by a CNN and contextual information of merged regions. The CSE is highly parameterized and can be seamlessly integrated into existing object detection frameworks. Enhanced by the data-dependent CSE mechanism, our curve text detection system provides robust instance-level text region extraction with minimal post-processing. The analysis experiment shows that our CSE can handle texts with various shapes, sizes, and orientations, and can effectively suppress the false-positives coming from text-like textures or unexpected texts included in the same RoI. Compared with the existing curve text detection algorithms, our method is more robust and enjoys a simpler processing flow. It also creates a new state-of-art performance on curve text benchmarks with F-measurement of up to 78.4%.
Revisiting Perspective Information for Efficient Crowd Counting
Authors: Miaojing Shi, Zhaohui Yang, Chao Xu, Qijun Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Crowd counting is the task of estimating people numbers in crowd images. Modern crowd counting methods employ deep neural networks to estimate crowd counts via crowd density regressions. A major challenge of this task lies in the perspective distortion, which results in drastic person scale change in an image. Density regression on the small person area is in general very hard. In this work, we propose a perspective-aware convolutional neural network (PACNN) for efficient crowd counting, which integrates the perspective information into density regression to provide additional knowledge of the person scale change in an image. Ground truth perspective maps are firstly generated for training; PACNN is then specifically designed to predict multi-scale perspective maps and encode them as perspective-aware weighting layers in the network to adaptively combine the outputs of multi-scale density maps. The weights are learned at every pixel of the maps such that the final density combination is robust to the perspective distortion. We conduct extensive experiments on the ShanghaiTech, WorldExpo'10, UCF_CC_50, and UCSD datasets, and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of PACNN over the state-of-the-art.
Towards Universal Object Detection by Domain Attention
Authors: Xudong Wang, Zhaowei Cai, Dashan Gao, Nuno Vasconcelos
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: 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 are available at http://www.svcl.ucsd.edu/projects/universal-detection/.
Ensemble Deep Manifold Similarity Learning Using Hard Proxies
Authors: Nicolas Aziere, Sinisa Todorovic
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper is about learning deep representations of images such that images belonging to the same class have more similar representations than those belonging to different classes. For this goal, prior work typically uses the triplet or N-pair loss, specified in terms of either l2-distances or dot-products between deep features. However, such formulations seem poorly  suited to the highly non-Euclidean deep feature space. Our first contribution is in specifying the N-pair loss in terms of manifold similarities between deep features. We introduce a new time- and memory-efficient method for estimating the manifold similarities by using a closed-form convergence solution of the Random Walk algorithm. Our efficiency comes, in part, from following the recent work that randomly partitions the deep feature space, and expresses image distances via representatives of the resulting subspaces, a.k.a. proxies. Our second contribution is aimed at reducing overfitting by estimating hard proxies that are as close to one another as possible, but remain in their respective subspaces. Our evaluation demonstrates that we outperform the state of the art in both image retrieval and clustering on the benchmark  CUB-200-2011, Cars196, and Stanford Online Products datasets.
Quantization Networks
Authors: Jiwei Yang, Xu Shen, Jun Xing, Xinmei Tian, Houqiang Li, Bing Deng, Jianqiang Huang, Xian-sheng Hua
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Although deep neural networks are highly effective, their high computational and memory costs severely hinder their applications to portable devices. As a consequence, lowbit quantization, which converts a full-precision neural network into a low-bitwidth integer version, has been an active and promising research topic. Existing methods formulate the low-bit quantization of networks as an approximation or optimization problem. Approximation-based methods confront the gradient mismatch problem, while optimizationbased methods are only suitable for quantizing weights and can introduce high computational cost during the training stage. In this paper, we provide a simple and uniform way for weights and activations quantization by formulating it as a differentiable non-linear function. The quantization function is represented as a linear combination of several Sigmoid functions with learnable biases and scales that could be learned in a lossless and end-to-end manner via continuous relaxation of the steepness of Sigmoid functions. Extensive experiments on image classification and object detection tasks show that our quantization networks outperform state-of-the-art methods. We believe that the proposed method will shed new lights on the interpretation of neural network quantization.
RES-PCA: A Scalable Approach to Recovering Low-Rank Matrices
Authors: Chong Peng, Chenglizhao Chen, Zhao Kang, Jianbo Li, Qiang Cheng
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) has drawn significant attentions due to its powerful capability in recovering low-rank matrices as well as successful appplications in various real world problems. The current state-of-the-art algorithms usually need to solve singular value decomposition of large matrices, which generally has at least a quadratic or even cubic complexity. This drawback has limited the application of RPCA in solving real world problems. To combat this drawback, in this paper we propose a new type of RPCA method, RES-PCA, which is linearly efficient and scalable in both data size and dimension. For comparison purpose, AltProj, an existing scalable approach to RPCA requires the precise knowlwdge of the true rank; otherwise, it may fail to recover low-rank matrices. By contrast, our method works with or without knowing the true rank; even when both methods work, our method is faster. Extensive experiments have been performed and testified to the effectiveness of proposed method quantitatively and in visual quality, which suggests that our method is suitable to be employed as a light-weight, scalable component for RPCA in any application pipelines.
Occlusion-Net: 2D/3D Occluded Keypoint Localization Using Graph Networks
Authors: N. Dinesh Reddy, Minh Vo, Srinivasa G. Narasimhan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We present Occlusion-Net, a framework to predict 2D and 3D locations of occluded keypoints for objects, in a largely self-supervised manner. We use an off-the-shelf detector as input (like MaskRCNN) that is trained only on visible key point annotations. This is the only supervision used in this work. A graph encoder network then explicitly classifies invisible edges and a graph decoder network corrects the occluded keypoint locations from the initial detector. Central to this work is a trifocal tensor loss that provides indirect self-supervision for occluded keypoint locations that are visible in other views of the object. The 2D keypoints are then passed into a 3D graph network that estimates the 3D shape and camera pose using the self-supervised re-projection loss. At test time, our approach successfully localizes keypoints in a single view under a diverse set of severe occlusion settings. We demonstrate and evaluate our approach on synthetic CAD data as well as a large image set capturing vehicles at many busy city intersections. As an interesting aside, we compare the accuracy of human labels of invisible keypoints against those obtained from geometric trifocal-tensor loss.
Efficient Featurized Image Pyramid Network for Single Shot Detector
Authors: Yanwei Pang, Tiancai Wang, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Ling Shao
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Single-stage object detectors have recently gained popularity due to their combined advantage of high detection accuracy and real-time speed. However, while promising results have been achieved by these detectors on standard-sized objects, their performance on small objects is far from satisfactory. To detect very small/large objects, classical pyramid representation can be exploited, where an image pyramid is used to build a feature pyramid (featurized image pyramid), enabling detection across a range of scales. Existing single-stage detectors avoid such a featurized image pyramid representation due to its memory and time complexity. In this paper, we introduce a light-weight architecture to efficiently produce featurized image pyramid in a single-stage detection framework. The resulting multi-scale features are then injected into the prediction layers of the detector using an attention module. The performance of our detector is validated on two benchmarks: PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. For a 300x300 input, our detector operates at 111 frames per second (FPS) on a Titan X GPU, providing state-of-the-art detection accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007 testset. On the MS COCO testset, our detector achieves state-of-the-art results surpassing all existing single-stage methods in the case of single-scale inference.
Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Ming Liang, Bin Yang, Yun Chen, Rui Hu, Raquel Urtasun
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In this paper we propose to exploit multiple related tasks for accurate  multi-sensor 3D object detection. Towards this goal we present an end-to-end learnable architecture that reasons about 2D and 3D object detection as well as ground estimation and depth completion. Our experiments show that all these tasks are complementary  and help the network learn better representations by fusing information at various levels. Importantly, our approach leads the KITTI benchmark on 2D, 3D and bird's eye view object detection, while being real-time.