10,16,2021

 Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression2019-04-14   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Intersection over Union (IoU) is the most popular evaluation metric used in the object detection benchmarks. However, there is a gap between optimizing the commonly used distance losses for regressing the parameters of a bounding box and maximizing this metric value. The optimal objective for a metric is the metric itself. In the case of axis-aligned 2D bounding boxes, it can be shown that $IoU$ can be directly used as a regression loss. However, $IoU$ has a plateau making it infeasible to optimize in the case of non-overlapping bounding boxes. In this paper, we address the weaknesses of $IoU$ by introducing a generalized version as both a new loss and a new metric. By incorporating this generalized $IoU$ ($GIoU$) as a loss into the state-of-the art object detection frameworks, we show a consistent improvement on their performance using both the standard, $IoU$ based, and new, $GIoU$ based, performance measures on popular object detection benchmarks such as PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. RODEO: Replay for Online Object Detection2020-08-14   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Humans can incrementally learn to do new visual detection tasks, which is a huge challenge for today's computer vision systems. Incrementally trained deep learning models lack backwards transfer to previously seen classes and suffer from a phenomenon known as $"catastrophic forgetting."$ In this paper, we pioneer online streaming learning for object detection, where an agent must learn examples one at a time with severe memory and computational constraints. In object detection, a system must output all bounding boxes for an image with the correct label. Unlike earlier work, the system described in this paper can learn this task in an online manner with new classes being introduced over time. We achieve this capability by using a novel memory replay mechanism that efficiently replays entire scenes. We achieve state-of-the-art results on both the PASCAL VOC 2007 and MS COCO datasets. Consistency-based Active Learning for Object Detection2021-03-18   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Active learning aims to improve the performance of task model by selecting the most informative samples with a limited budget. Unlike most recent works that focused on applying active learning for image classification, we propose an effective Consistency-based Active Learning method for object Detection (CALD), which fully explores the consistency between original and augmented data. CALD has three appealing benefits. (i) CALD is systematically designed by investigating the weaknesses of existing active learning methods, which do not take the unique challenges of object detection into account. (ii) CALD unifies box regression and classification with a single metric, which is not concerned by active learning methods for classification. CALD also focuses on the most informative local region rather than the whole image, which is beneficial for object detection. (iii) CALD not only gauges individual information for sample selection, but also leverages mutual information to encourage a balanced data distribution. Extensive experiments show that CALD significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art task-agnostic and detection-specific active learning methods on general object detection datasets. Based on the Faster R-CNN detector, CALD consistently surpasses the baseline method (random selection) by 2.9/2.8/0.8 mAP on average on PASCAL VOC 2007, PASCAL VOC 2012, and MS COCO. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/we1pingyu/CALD} Object Contour Detection with a Fully Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Network2016-03-14   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ We develop a deep learning algorithm for contour detection with a fully convolutional encoder-decoder network. Different from previous low-level edge detection, our algorithm focuses on detecting higher-level object contours. Our network is trained end-to-end on PASCAL VOC with refined ground truth from inaccurate polygon annotations, yielding much higher precision in object contour detection than previous methods. We find that the learned model generalizes well to unseen object classes from the same super-categories on MS COCO and can match state-of-the-art edge detection on BSDS500 with fine-tuning. By combining with the multiscale combinatorial grouping algorithm, our method can generate high-quality segmented object proposals, which significantly advance the state-of-the-art on PASCAL VOC (improving average recall from 0.62 to 0.67) with a relatively small amount of candidates ($\sim$1660 per image). Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining2016-04-12   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ The field of object detection has made significant advances riding on the wave of region-based ConvNets, but their training procedure still includes many heuristics and hyperparameters that are costly to tune. We present a simple yet surprisingly effective online hard example mining (OHEM) algorithm for training region-based ConvNet detectors. Our motivation is the same as it has always been -- detection datasets contain an overwhelming number of easy examples and a small number of hard examples. Automatic selection of these hard examples can make training more effective and efficient. OHEM is a simple and intuitive algorithm that eliminates several heuristics and hyperparameters in common use. But more importantly, it yields consistent and significant boosts in detection performance on benchmarks like PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012. Its effectiveness increases as datasets become larger and more difficult, as demonstrated by the results on the MS COCO dataset. Moreover, combined with complementary advances in the field, OHEM leads to state-of-the-art results of 78.9% and 76.3% mAP on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 respectively. Comprehensive Attention Self-Distillation for Weakly-Supervised Object Detection2020-10-22   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Weakly Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) has emerged as an effective tool to train object detectors using only the image-level category labels. However, without object-level labels, WSOD detectors are prone to detect bounding boxes on salient objects, clustered objects and discriminative object parts. Moreover, the image-level category labels do not enforce consistent object detection across different transformations of the same images. To address the above issues, we propose a Comprehensive Attention Self-Distillation (CASD) training approach for WSOD. To balance feature learning among all object instances, CASD computes the comprehensive attention aggregated from multiple transformations and feature layers of the same images. To enforce consistent spatial supervision on objects, CASD conducts self-distillation on the WSOD networks, such that the comprehensive attention is approximated simultaneously by multiple transformations and feature layers of the same images. CASD produces new state-of-the-art WSOD results on standard benchmarks such as PASCAL VOC 2007/2012 and MS-COCO. Towards Adversarially Robust Object Detection2019-07-24   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Object detection is an important vision task and has emerged as an indispensable component in many vision system, rendering its robustness as an increasingly important performance factor for practical applications. While object detection models have been demonstrated to be vulnerable against adversarial attacks by many recent works, very few efforts have been devoted to improving their robustness. In this work, we take an initial attempt towards this direction. We first revisit and systematically analyze object detectors and many recently developed attacks from the perspective of model robustness. We then present a multi-task learning perspective of object detection and identify an asymmetric role of task losses. We further develop an adversarial training approach which can leverage the multiple sources of attacks for improving the robustness of detection models. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO verified the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Solving Missing-Annotation Object Detection with Background Recalibration Loss2020-02-12   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ This paper focuses on a novel and challenging detection scenario: A majority of true objects/instances is unlabeled in the datasets, so these missing-labeled areas will be regarded as the background during training. Previous art on this problem has proposed to use soft sampling to re-weight the gradients of RoIs based on the overlaps with positive instances, while their method is mainly based on the two-stage detector (i.e. Faster RCNN) which is more robust and friendly for the missing label scenario. In this paper, we introduce a superior solution called Background Recalibration Loss (BRL) that can automatically re-calibrate the loss signals according to the pre-defined IoU threshold and input image. Our design is built on the one-stage detector which is faster and lighter. Inspired by the Focal Loss formulation, we make several significant modifications to fit on the missing-annotation circumstance. We conduct extensive experiments on the curated PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the baseline and other state-of-the-arts by a large margin. End-to-end Deep Object Tracking with Circular Loss Function for Rotated Bounding Box2020-12-17   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ The task object tracking is vital in numerous applications such as autonomous driving, intelligent surveillance, robotics, etc. This task entails the assigning of a bounding box to an object in a video stream, given only the bounding box for that object on the first frame. In 2015, a new type of video object tracking (VOT) dataset was created that introduced rotated bounding boxes as an extension of axis-aligned ones. In this work, we introduce a novel end-to-end deep learning method based on the Transformer Multi-Head Attention architecture. We also present a new type of loss function, which takes into account the bounding box overlap and orientation. Our Deep Object Tracking model with Circular Loss Function (DOTCL) shows an considerable improvement in terms of robustness over current state-of-the-art end-to-end deep learning models. It also outperforms state-of-the-art object tracking methods on VOT2018 dataset in terms of expected average overlap (EAO) metric. Deep learning for class-generic object detection2013-12-24   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ We investigate the use of deep neural networks for the novel task of class generic object detection. We show that neural networks originally designed for image recognition can be trained to detect objects within images, regardless of their class, including objects for which no bounding box labels have been provided. In addition, we show that bounding box labels yield a 1% performance increase on the ImageNet recognition challenge. LocNet: Improving Localization Accuracy for Object Detection2016-04-07   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ We propose a novel object localization methodology with the purpose of boosting the localization accuracy of state-of-the-art object detection systems. Our model, given a search region, aims at returning the bounding box of an object of interest inside this region. To accomplish its goal, it relies on assigning conditional probabilities to each row and column of this region, where these probabilities provide useful information regarding the location of the boundaries of the object inside the search region and allow the accurate inference of the object bounding box under a simple probabilistic framework. For implementing our localization model, we make use of a convolutional neural network architecture that is properly adapted for this task, called LocNet. We show experimentally that LocNet achieves a very significant improvement on the mAP for high IoU thresholds on PASCAL VOC2007 test set and that it can be very easily coupled with recent state-of-the-art object detection systems, helping them to boost their performance. Finally, we demonstrate that our detection approach can achieve high detection accuracy even when it is given as input a set of sliding windows, thus proving that it is independent of box proposal methods. Beyond Single Instance Multi-view Unsupervised Representation Learning2020-11-26   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Recent unsupervised contrastive representation learning follows a Single Instance Multi-view (SIM) paradigm where positive pairs are usually constructed with intra-image data augmentation. In this paper, we propose an effective approach called Beyond Single Instance Multi-view (BSIM). Specifically, we impose more accurate instance discrimination capability by measuring the joint similarity between two randomly sampled instances and their mixture, namely spurious-positive pairs. We believe that learning joint similarity helps to improve the performance when encoded features are distributed more evenly in the latent space. We apply it as an orthogonal improvement for unsupervised contrastive representation learning, including current outstanding methods SimCLR, MoCo, and BYOL. We evaluate our learned representations on many downstream benchmarks like linear classification on ImageNet-1k and PASCAL VOC 2007, object detection on MS COCO 2017 and VOC, etc. We obtain substantial gains with a large margin almost on all these tasks compared with prior arts. IENet: Interacting Embranchment One Stage Anchor Free Detector for Orientation Aerial Object Detection2019-12-02   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Object detection in aerial images is a challenging task due to its lack of visiable features and variant orientation of objects. Currently, amount of R-CNN framework based detectors have made significant progress in predicting targets by horizontal bounding boxes (HBB) and oriented bounding boxes (OBB). However, there is still open space for one-stage anchor free solutions. This paper proposes a one-stage anchor free detector for orientional object in aerial images, which is built upon a per-pixel prediction fashion detector. We make it possible by developing a branch interacting module with a self-attention mechanism to fuse features from classification and box regression branchs. Moreover a geometric transformation is employed in angle prediction to make it more manageable for the prediction network. We also introduce an IOU loss for OBB detection, which is more efficient than regular polygon IOU. The propsed method is evaluated on DOTA and HRSC2016 datasets, and the outcomes show the higher OBB detection performance from our propsed IENet when compared with the state-of-the-art detectors. Ensembling object detectors for image and video data analysis2021-02-09   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ In this paper, we propose a method for ensembling the outputs of multiple object detectors for improving detection performance and precision of bounding boxes on image data. We further extend it to video data by proposing a two-stage tracking-based scheme for detection refinement. The proposed method can be used as a standalone approach for improving object detection performance, or as a part of a framework for faster bounding box annotation in unseen datasets, assuming that the objects of interest are those present in some common public datasets. Attention-based Joint Detection of Object and Semantic Part2020-07-05   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ In this paper, we address the problem of joint detection of objects like dog and its semantic parts like face, leg, etc. Our model is created on top of two Faster-RCNN models that share their features to perform a novel Attention-based feature fusion of related Object and Part features to get enhanced representations of both. These representations are used for final classification and bounding box regression separately for both models. Our experiments on the PASCAL-Part 2010 dataset show that joint detection can simultaneously improve both object detection and part detection in terms of mean Average Precision (mAP) at IoU=0.5. Connecting the Dots: Detecting Adversarial Perturbations Using Context Inconsistency2020-07-24   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ There has been a recent surge in research on adversarial perturbations that defeat Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in machine vision; most of these perturbation-based attacks target object classifiers. Inspired by the observation that humans are able to recognize objects that appear out of place in a scene or along with other unlikely objects, we augment the DNN with a system that learns context consistency rules during training and checks for the violations of the same during testing. Our approach builds a set of auto-encoders, one for each object class, appropriately trained so as to output a discrepancy between the input and output if an added adversarial perturbation violates context consistency rules. Experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO show that our method effectively detects various adversarial attacks and achieves high ROC-AUC (over 0.95 in most cases); this corresponds to over 20% improvement over a state-of-the-art context-agnostic method. Incremental Object Detection via Meta-Learning2020-03-17   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ In a real-world setting, object instances from new classes may be continuously encountered by object detectors. When existing object detectors are applied to such scenarios, their performance on old classes deteriorates significantly. A few efforts have been reported to address this limitation, all of which apply variants of knowledge distillation to avoid catastrophic forgetting. We note that although distillation helps to retain previous learning, it obstructs fast adaptability to new tasks, which is a critical requirement for incremental learning. In this pursuit, we propose a meta-learning approach that learns to reshape model gradients, such that information across incremental tasks is optimally shared. This ensures a seamless information transfer via a meta-learned gradient preconditioning that minimizes forgetting and maximizes knowledge transfer. In comparison to existing meta-learning methods, our approach is task-agnostic, allows incremental addition of new-classes and scales to large-sized models for object detection. We evaluate our approach on a variety of incremental settings defined on PASCAL-VOC and MS COCO datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art. Object detection for crabs in top-view seabed imagery2021-05-01   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ This report presents the application of object detection on a database of underwater images of different species of crabs, as well as aerial images of sea lions and finally the Pascal VOC dataset. The model is an end-to-end object detection neural network based on a convolutional network base and a Long Short-Term Memory detector. Distribution-Balanced Loss for Multi-Label Classification in Long-Tailed Datasets2020-07-25   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ We present a new loss function called Distribution-Balanced Loss for the multi-label recognition problems that exhibit long-tailed class distributions. Compared to conventional single-label classification problem, multi-label recognition problems are often more challenging due to two significant issues, namely the co-occurrence of labels and the dominance of negative labels (when treated as multiple binary classification problems). The Distribution-Balanced Loss tackles these issues through two key modifications to the standard binary cross-entropy loss: 1) a new way to re-balance the weights that takes into account the impact caused by label co-occurrence, and 2) a negative tolerant regularization to mitigate the over-suppression of negative labels. Experiments on both Pascal VOC and COCO show that the models trained with this new loss function achieve significant performance gains over existing methods. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/wutong16/DistributionBalancedLoss . VSE++: Improving Visual-Semantic Embeddings with Hard Negatives2018-07-29   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ We present a new technique for learning visual-semantic embeddings for cross-modal retrieval. Inspired by hard negative mining, the use of hard negatives in structured prediction, and ranking loss functions, we introduce a simple change to common loss functions used for multi-modal embeddings. That, combined with fine-tuning and use of augmented data, yields significant gains in retrieval performance. We showcase our approach, VSE++, on MS-COCO and Flickr30K datasets, using ablation studies and comparisons with existing methods. On MS-COCO our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 8.8% in caption retrieval and 11.3% in image retrieval (at R@1).