In this paper, we study the sensitivity of CNN outputs with respect to image transformations and noise in the area of fine-grained recognition. In particular, we answer the following questions (1) how sensitive are CNNs with respect to image transformations encountered during wild image capture?; (2) how can we predict CNN sensitivity?; and (3) can we increase the robustness of CNNs with respect to image degradations? To answer the first question, we provide an extensive empirical sensitivity analysis of commonly used CNN architectures (AlexNet, VGG19, GoogleNet) across various types of image degradations. This allows for predicting CNN performance for new domains comprised by images of lower quality or captured from a different viewpoint. We also show how the sensitivity of CNN outputs can be predicted for single images. Furthermore, we demonstrate that input layer dropout or pre-filtering during test time only reduces CNN sensitivity for high levels of degradation.
Experiments for fine-grained recognition tasks reveal that VGG19 is more robust to severe image degradations than AlexNet and GoogleNet. However, small intensity noise can lead to dramatic changes in CNN performance even for VGG19.
Extremely Fine-Grained Visual Classification over Resembling Glyphs in the Wild
School of Computer and Information Engineering, Henan University（河南大学计算机与信息工程学院）；UPV/EHU（巴斯克大学）；IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science（巴斯克科学基金会（IKERBASQUE））
The goal of this paper is to label all the animal individuals present in every frame of a video. Unlike previous methods that have principally concentrated on labelling face tracks, we aim to label individuals even when their faces are not visible. We make the following contributions: (i) we introduce a 'Count, Crop and Recognise' (CCR) multistage recognition process for frame level labelling. The Count and Recognise stages involve specialised CNNs for the task, and we show that this simple staging gives a substantial boost in performance; (ii) we compare the recall using frame based labelling…
The world is long-tailed. What does this mean for computer vision and visual recognition? The main two implications are (1) the number of categories we need to consider in applications can be very large, and (2) the number of training examples for most categories can be very small. Current visual recognition algorithms have achieved excellent classification accuracy. However, they require many training examples to reach peak performance, which suggests that long-tailed distributions will not be dealt with well. We analyze this question in the context of eBird, a large fine-grained classificati…
Facial expression recognition (FER) in the wild is crucial for building reliable human-computer interactive systems. However, annotations of large scale datasets in FER has been a key challenge as these datasets suffer from noise due to various factors like crowd sourcing, subjectivity of annotators, poor quality of images, automatic labelling based on key word search etc. Such noisy annotations impede the performance of FER due to the memorization ability of deep networks. During early learning stage, deep networks fit on clean data. Then, eventually, they start overfitting on noisy labels du…
Current approaches for fine-grained recognition do the following: First, recruit experts to annotate a dataset of images, optionally also collecting more structured data in the form of part annotations and bounding boxes. Second, train a model utilizing this data. Toward the goal of solving fine-grained recognition, we introduce an alternative approach, leveraging free, noisy data from the web and simple, generic methods of recognition. This approach has benefits in both performance and scalability. We demonstrate its efficacy on four fine-grained datasets, greatly exceeding existing state of …
Learning with noisy labels (LNL) aims to ensure model generalization given a label-corrupted training set. In this work, we investigate a rarely studied scenario of LNL on fine-grained datasets (LNL-FG), which is more practical and challenging as large inter-class ambiguities among fine-grained classes cause more noisy labels. We empirically show that existing methods that work well for LNL fail to achieve satisfying performance for LNL-FG, arising the practical need of effective solutions for LNL-FG. To this end, we propose a novel framework called stochastic noise-tolerated supervised contra…
National Internet Emergency Center(CNCERT)（国家互联网应急中心）；Baidu（百度）
Simi-Supervised Recognition Challenge-FGVC7 is a challenging fine-grained recognition competition. One of the difficulties of this competition is how to use unlabeled data. We adopted pseudo-tag data mining to increase the amount of training data. The other one is how to identify similar birds with a very small difference, especially those have a relatively tiny main-body in examples. We combined generic image recognition and fine-grained image recognition method to solve the problem. All generic image recognition models were training using PaddleClas . Using the combination of two different w…
The fifth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition has multiple challenges such as Valence-Arousal Estimation Challenge, Expression Classification Challenge, Action Unit Detection Challenge, Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation Challenge. In this paper we have dealt only expression classification challenge using multiple approaches such as fully supervised, semi-supervised and noisy label approach. Our approach using noise aware model has performed better than baseline model by 10.46% and semi supervised model has performed better than baseline model by 9.38% and the fully…
Sensetime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Learning robust feature representation from large-scale noisy faces stands out as one of the key challenges in high-performance face recognition. Recent attempts have been made to cope with this challenge by alleviating the intra-class conflict and inter-class conflict. However, the unconstrained noise type in each conflict still makes it difficult for these algorithms to perform well. To better understand this, we reformulate the noise type of each class in a more fine-grained manner as N-identities|K^C-clusters. Different types of noisy faces can be generated by adjusting the values of \nkc.…
A video dataset that is designed to study fine-grained categorisation of pedestrians is introduced. Pedestrians were recorded "in-the-wild" from a moving vehicle. Annotations include bounding boxes, tracks, 14 keypoints with occlusion information and the fine-grained categories of age (5 classes), sex (2 classes), weight (3 classes) and clothing style (4 classes). There are a total of 27,454 bounding box and pose labels across 4222 tracks. This dataset is designed to train and test algorithms for fine-grained categorisation of people, it is also useful for benchmarking tracking, detection and …
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Labeling objects at a subordinate level typically requires expert knowledge, which is not always available when using random annotators. As such, learning directly from web images for fine-grained recognition has attracted broad attention. However, the presence of label noise and hard examples in web images are two obstacles for training robust fine-grained recognition models. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach for removing irrelevant samples from real-world web images during training, while employing useful hard examples to update the network. Thus, our approach can allevia…
Fine-grained classification remains a very challenging problem, because of the absence of well-labeled training data caused by the high cost of annotating a large number of fine-grained categories. In the extreme case, given a set of test categories without any well-labeled training data, the majority of existing works can be grouped into the following two research directions: 1) crawl noisy labeled web data for the test categories as training data, which is dubbed as webly supervised learning; 2) transfer the knowledge from auxiliary categories with well-labeled training data to the test cate…
One of the key issues in facial expression recognition in the wild (FER-W) is that curating large-scale labeled facial images is challenging due to the inherent complexity and ambiguity of facial images. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a self-supervised simple facial landmark encoding (SimFLE) method that can learn effective encoding of facial landmarks, which are important features for improving the performance of FER-W, without expensive labels. Specifically, we introduce novel FaceMAE module for this purpose. FaceMAE reconstructs masked facial images with elaborately designed semantic …
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Constructing fine-grained image datasets typically requires domain-specific expert knowledge, which is not always available for crowd-sourcing platform annotators. Accordingly, learning directly from web images becomes an alternative method for fine-grained visual recognition. However, label noise in the web training set can severely degrade the model performance. To this end, we propose a data-driven meta-set based approach to deal with noisy web images for fine-grained recognition. Specifically, guided by a small amount of clean meta-set, we train a selection net in a meta-learning manner to…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Facial expression recognition (FER) is an essential task for understanding human behaviors. As one of the most informative behaviors of humans, facial expressions are often compound and variable, which is manifested by the fact that different people may express the same expression in very different ways. However, most FER methods still use one-hot or soft labels as the supervision, which lack sufficient semantic descriptions of facial expressions and are less interpretable. Recently, contrastive vision-language pre-training (VLP) models (e.g., CLIP) use text as supervision and have injected ne…
Peking University（北京大学）；Intellifusion（云天励飞）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Various factors like occlusions, backgrounds, etc., would lead to misaligned detected bounding boxes , e.g., ones covering only portions of human body. This issue is common but overlooked by previous person search works. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes an Align-to-Part Network (APNet) for person detection and re-Identification (reID). APNet refines detected bounding boxes to cover the estimated holistic body regions, from which discriminative part features can be extracted and aligned. Aligned part features naturally formulate reID as a partial feature matching procedure, where va…
Recognizing facial expression in a wild setting has remained a challenging task in computer vision. The World Wide Web is a good source of facial images which most of them are captured in uncontrolled conditions. In fact, the Internet is a Word Wild Web of facial images with expressions. This paper presents the results of a new study on collecting, annotating, and analyzing wild facial expressions from the web. Three search engines were queried using 1250 emotion related keywords in six different languages and the retrieved images were mapped by two annotators to six basic expressions and neut…
Facial expression recognition from videos in the wild is a challenging task due to the lack of abundant labelled training data. Large DNN (deep neural network) architectures and ensemble methods have resulted in better performance, but soon reach saturation at some point due to data inadequacy. In this paper, we use a self-training method that utilizes a combination of a labelled dataset and an unlabelled dataset (Body Language Dataset - BoLD). Experimental analysis shows that training a noisy student network iteratively helps in achieving significantly better results. Additionally, our model …
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Tencent Youtu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）
This is a technical report for CVPR 2021 AliProducts Challenge. AliProducts Challenge is a competition proposed for studying the large-scale and fine-grained commodity image recognition problem encountered by worldleading ecommerce companies. The large-scale product recognition simultaneously meets the challenge of noisy annotations, imbalanced (long-tailed) data distribution and fine-grained classification. In our solution, we adopt stateof-the-art model architectures of both CNNs and Transformer, including ResNeSt, EfficientNetV2, and DeiT. We found that iterative data cleaning, classifier w…
While fine-grained object recognition is an important problem in computer vision, current models are unlikely to accurately classify objects in the wild. These fully supervised models need additional annotated images to classify objects in every new scenario, a task that is infeasible. However, sources such as e-commerce websites and field guides provide annotated images for many classes. In this work, we study fine-grained domain adaptation as a step towards overcoming the dataset shift between easily acquired annotated images and the real world. Adaptation has not been studied in the fine-gr…
University of Kansas（堪萨斯大学）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）
Fingerspelling in sign language has been the means of communicating technical terms and proper nouns when they do not have dedicated sign language gestures. Automatic recognition of fingerspelling can help resolve communication barriers when interacting with deaf people. The main challenges prevalent in fingerspelling recognition are the ambiguity in the gestures and strong articulation of the hands. The automatic recognition model should address high inter-class visual similarity and high intra-class variation in the gestures. Most of the existing research in fingerspelling recognition has fo…
Plant species identification in the wild is a difficult problem in part due to the high variability of the input data, but also because of complications induced by the long-tail effects of the datasets distribution. Inspired by the most recent fine-grained visual classification approaches which are based on attention to mitigate the effects of data variability, we explore the idea of using object detection as a form of attention. We introduce a bottom-up approach based on detecting plant organs and fusing the predictions of a variable number of organ-based species classifiers. We also curate a…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Huawei R&D UK（华为英国研发中心）
Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Learning from videos has been shown to improve model's performance on various downstream tasks. However, such Self-Supervised pre-training requires large batch sizes and a large amount of computation resources due to the noise present in the uncurated data. This is partly due to the fact that the prevalent training scheme is trained on coarse-grained setting, in which vectors representing the whole video clips or natural language sentences are used for computing similarity. Such scheme makes training noisy as part of the video clips can be totally not correlated wit…
MILA, Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms（MILA蒙特利尔学习算法研究所）；Paris-Saclay University（巴黎萨克雷大学）；CentraleSupélec Paris (ECP)（巴黎中央理工学院）；INRIA Paris（法国国家信息与自动化研究所巴黎分部）；Operations Research Center, MIT（麻省理工学院运筹学中心）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Fine-grained classification aims at distinguishing between items with similar global perception and patterns, but that differ by minute details. Our primary challenges come from both small inter-class variations and large intra-class variations. In this article, we propose to combine several innovations to improve fine-grained classification within the use-case of wildlife, which is of practical interest for experts. We utilize geo-spatiotemporal data to enrich the picture information and further improve the performance. We also investigate state-of-the-art methods for handling the imbalanced …
North China Electric Power University（华北电力大学）；University of Missouri（密苏里大学）
Age estimation from a single face image has been an essential task in the field of human-computer interaction and computer vision, which has a wide range of practical application values. Accuracy of age estimation of face images in the wild is relatively low for existing methods, because they only take into account the global features, while neglecting the fine-grained features of age-sensitive areas. We propose a novel method based on our attention long short-term memory (AL) network for fine-grained age estimation in the wild, inspired by the fine-grained categories and the visual attention …
HSEmotion Team at ABAW-10 Competition: Facial Expression Recognition, Valence-Arousal Estimation, Action Unit Detection and Fine-Grained Violence Classification
Tianjin University（天津大学）；State Administration of Cultural Heritage（国家文物局）
Active camera relocalization (ACR) is a new problem in computer vision that significantly reduces the false alarm caused by image distortions due to camera pose misalignment in fine-grained change detection (FGCD). Despite the fruitful achievements that ACR can support, it still remains a challenging problem caused by the unstable results of relative pose estimation, especially for outdoor scenes, where the lighting condition is out of control, i.e., the twice observations may have highly varied illuminations. This paper studies an illumination-invariant active camera relocalization method, it…
OpenCVL: An Open, Diverse, and Large-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech)（南方科技大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Zenseact（Zenseact公司）
FireSentry: A Multi-Modal Spatio-temporal Benchmark Dataset for Fine-Grained Wildfire Spread Forecasting
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学电子工程系）；College of Soil and Water Conservation, Southwest Forestry University（西南林业大学水土保持学院）；College of Civil Engineering, Southwest Forestry University（西南林业大学土木工程学院）
The PanAf-SBR Dataset: Social Behaviour Recognition for Wild Great Apes
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；Wild Chimpanzee Foundation（野生黑猩猩基金会）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of California（加利福尼亚大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology（马克斯·普朗克进化人类学研究所）；Senckenberg Museum of Natural History（森肯伯格自然历史博物馆）
Cross-domain Multi-step Thinking: Zero-shot Fine-grained Traffic Sign Recognition in the Wild
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University（信息科学与技术研究生学校，北海道大学）；Education and Research Center for Mathematical and Data Science, Hokkaido University（数学与数据科学教育与研究中心，北海道大学）；Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University（信息科学与技术学院，北海道大学）
This paper describes our approach for the Disguised Faces in the Wild (DFW) 2018 challenge. The task here is to verify the identity of a person among disguised and impostors images. Given the importance of the task of face verification it is essential to compare methods across a common platform. Our approach is based on VGG-face architecture paired with Contrastive loss based on cosine distance metric. For augmenting the data set, we source more data from the internet. The experiments show the effectiveness of the approach on the DFW data. We show that adding extra data to the DFW dataset with…
University of Verona（维罗纳大学）；Sapienza University of Rome（罗马大学）
Capturing the essence of a textile image in a robust way is important to retrieve it in a large repository, especially if it has been acquired in the wild (by taking a photo of the textile of interest). In this paper we show that a texel-based representation fits well with this task. In particular, we refer to Texel-Att, a recent texel-based descriptor which has shown to capture fine grained variations of a texture, for retrieval purposes. After a brief explanation of Texel-Att, we will show in our experiments that this descriptor is robust to distortions resulting from acquisitions in the wil…
Recognising detailed clothing characteristics (fine-grained attributes) in unconstrained images of people in-the-wild is a challenging task for computer vision, especially when there is only limited training data from the wild whilst most data available for model learning are captured in well-controlled environments using fashion models (well lit, no background clutter, frontal view, high-resolution). In this work, we develop a deep learning framework capable of model transfer learning from well-controlled shop clothing images collected from web retailers to in-the-wild images from the street.…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）；Google Earth Outreach（谷歌地球推广）；Conservation International（国际自然保护协会）
Wildlife monitoring is crucial to nature conservation and has been done by manual observations from motion-triggered camera traps deployed in the field. Widespread adoption of such in-situ sensors has resulted in unprecedented data volumes being collected over the last decade. A significant challenge exists to process and reliably identify what is in these images efficiently. Advances in computer vision are poised to provide effective solutions with custom AI models built to automatically identify images of interest and label the species in them. Here we outline the data unification effort for…
Understanding the simultaneously very diverse and intricately fine-grained set of possible human actions is a critical open problem in computer vision. Manually labeling training videos is feasible for some action classes but doesn't scale to the full long-tailed distribution of actions. A promising way to address this is to leverage noisy data from web queries to learn new actions, using semi-supervised or "webly-supervised" approaches. However, these methods typically do not learn domain-specific knowledge, or rely on iterative hand-tuned data labeling policies. In this work, we instead prop…
Uber ATG；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Reconstructing high-quality 3D objects from sparse, partial observations from a single view is of crucial importance for various applications in computer vision, robotics, and graphics. While recent neural implicit modeling methods show promising results on synthetic or dense data, they perform poorly on sparse and noisy real-world data. We discover that the limitations of a popular neural implicit model are due to lack of robust shape priors and lack of proper regularization. In this work, we demonstrate highquality in-the-wild shape reconstruction using: (i) a deep encoder as a robust-initia…
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；École Normale Supérieure（巴黎高等师范学院）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）
This paper addresses unsupervised discovery and localization of dominant objects from a noisy image collection with multiple object classes. The setting of this problem is fully unsupervised, without even image-level annotations or any assumption of a single dominant class. This is far more general than typical colocalization, cosegmentation, or weakly-supervised localization tasks. We tackle the discovery and localization problem using a part-based region matching approach: We use off-the-shelf region proposals to form a set of candidate bounding boxes for objects and object parts. These regi…
In many real-world datasets, like WebVision, the performance of DNN based classifier is often limited by the noisy labeled data. To tackle this problem, some image related side information, such as captions and tags, often reveal underlying relationships across images. In this paper, we present an efficient weakly supervised learning by using a Side Information Network (SINet), which aims to effectively carry out a large scale classification with severely noisy labels. The proposed SINet consists of a visual prototype module and a noise weighting module. The visual prototype module is designed…
The previous fine-grained datasets mainly focus on classification and are often captured in a controlled setup, with the camera focusing on the objects. We introduce the first Fine-Grained Vehicle Detection (FGVD) dataset in the wild, captured from a moving camera mounted on a car. It contains 5502 scene images with 210 unique fine-grained labels of multiple vehicle types organized in a three-level hierarchy. While previous classification datasets also include makes for different kinds of cars, the FGVD dataset introduces new class labels for categorizing two-wheelers, autorickshaws, and truck…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Apple（苹果公司）
Neural implicit functions have recently shown promising results on surface reconstructions from multiple views. However, current methods still suffer from excessive time complexity and poor robustness when reconstructing unbounded or complex scenes. In this paper, we present RegSDF, which shows that proper point cloud supervisions and geometry regularizations are sufficient to produce high-quality and robust reconstruction results. Specifically, RegSDF takes an additional oriented point cloud as input, and optimizes a signed distance field and a surface light field within a differentiable rend…
Predicting 3D human poses in real-world scenarios, also known as human pose forecasting, is inevitably subject to noisy inputs arising from inaccurate 3D pose estimations and occlusions. To address these challenges, we propose a diffusion-based approach that can predict given noisy observations. We frame the prediction task as a denoising problem, where both observation and prediction are considered as a single sequence containing missing elements (whether in the observation or prediction horizon). All missing elements are treated as noise and denoised with our conditional diffusion model. To …
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）
This paper focuses on the problem of script identification in unconstrained scenarios. Script identification is an important prerequisite to recognition, and an indispensable condition for automatic text understanding systems designed for multi-language environments. Although widely studied for document images and handwritten documents, it remains an almost unexplored territory for scene text images. We detail a novel method for script identification in natural images that combines convolutional features and the Naive-Bayes Nearest Neighbor classifier. The proposed framework efficiently exploi…
