Object recognition in 3D point clouds is a challenging task, mainly when time is an important factor to deal with, such as in industrial applications. Local descriptors are an amenable choice whenever the 6 DoF pose of recognized objects should also be estimated. However, the pipeline for this kind of descriptors is highly time-consuming. In this work, we propose an update to the traditional pipeline, by adding a preliminary filtering stage referred to as saliency boost. We perform tests on a standard object recognition benchmark by considering four keypoint detectors and four local descriptors, in order to compare time and recognition performance between the traditional pipeline and the boosted one. Results on time show that the boosted pipeline could turn out up to 5 times faster, with the recognition rate improving in most of the cases and exhibiting only a slight decrease in the others. These results suggest that the boosted pipeline can speed-up processing time substantially with limited impacts or even benefits in recognition accuracy.
State University of New York at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
3D point-cloud recognition with PointNet and its variants has received remarkable progress. A missing ingredient, however, is the ability to automatically evaluate point-wise importance w.r.t.\! classification performance, which is usually reflected by a saliency map. A saliency map is an important tool as it allows one to perform further processes on point-cloud data. In this paper, we propose a novel way of characterizing critical points and segments to build point-cloud saliency maps. Our method assigns each point a score reflecting its contribution to the model-recognition loss. The salien…
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee（威斯康星大学密尔沃基分校）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Saliency modeling has been an active research area in computer vision for about two decades. Existing state of the art models perform very well in predicting where people look in natural scenes. There is, however, the risk that these models may have been overfitting themselves to available small scale biased datasets, thus trapping the progress in a local minimum. To gain a deeper insight regarding current issues in saliency modeling and to better gauge progress, we recorded eye movements of 120 observers while they freely viewed a large number of naturalistic and artificial images. Our stimul…
SASep: Saliency-Aware Structured Separation of Geometry and Feature for Open Set Learning on Point Clouds
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Guangdong Intelligent Robotics Institute（广东智能机器人研究院）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Pazhou Laboratory（琶洲实验室）
Human visual attention has recently shown its distinct capability in boosting machine learning models. However, studies that aim to facilitate medical tasks with human visual attention are still scarce. To support the use of visual attention, this paper describes a novel deep learning model for visual saliency prediction on chest X-ray (CXR) images. To cope with data deficiency, we exploit the multi-task learning method and tackles disease classification on CXR simultaneously. For a more robust training process, we propose a further optimized multi-task learning scheme to better handle model o…
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Universidad del Bío Bío（比奥比奥大学）
Saliency is the perceptual capacity of our visual system to focus our attention (i.e. gaze) on relevant objects. Neural networks for saliency estimation require ground truth saliency maps for training which are usually achieved via eyetracking experiments. In the current paper, we demonstrate that saliency maps can be generated as a side-effect of training an object recognition deep neural network that is endowed with a saliency branch. Such a network does not require any ground-truth saliency maps for training.Extensive experiments carried out on both real and synthetic saliency datasets demo…
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Universidad del Bío Bío（比奥比奥大学）
This paper investigates the role of saliency to improve the classification accuracy of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the case when scarce training data is available. Our approach consists in adding a saliency branch to an existing CNN architecture which is used to modulate the standard bottom-up visual features from the original image input, acting as an attentional mechanism that guides the feature extraction process. The main aim of the proposed approach is to enable the effective training of a fine-grained recognition model with limited training samples and to improve the perform…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ)（香港科技大学（广州））；Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Training deep models for RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) often requires a large number of labeled RGB-D images. However, RGB-D data is not easily acquired, which limits the development of RGB-D SOD techniques. To alleviate this issue, we present a Dual-Semi RGB-D Salient Object Detection Network (DS-Net) to leverage unlabeled RGB images for boosting RGB-D saliency detection. We first devise a depth decoupling convolutional neural network (DDCNN), which contains a depth estimation branch and a saliency detection branch. The depth estimation branch is trained with RGB-D images and then used…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；DATA61, CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61所）
Human eyes concentrate different facial regions during distinct cognitive activities. We study utilising facial visual saliency maps to classify different facial expressions into different emotions. Our results show that our novel method of merely using facial saliency maps can achieve a descent accuracy of 65\%, much higher than the chance level of $1/7$. Furthermore, our approach is of semi-supervision, i.e., our facial saliency maps are generated from a general saliency prediction algorithm that is not explicitly designed for face images. We also discovered that the classification accuracie…
Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience（维尔纳·赖卡特综合神经科学中心）；University Tübingen（图宾根大学）
Recent results suggest that state-of-the-art saliency models perform far from optimal in predicting fixations. This lack in performance has been attributed to an inability to model the influence of high-level image features such as objects. Recent seminal advances in applying deep neural networks to tasks like object recognition suggests that they are able to capture this kind of structure. However, the enormous amount of training data necessary to train these networks makes them difficult to apply directly to saliency prediction. We present a novel way of reusing existing neural networks that…
We have developed a convolutional neural network for the purpose of recognizing facial expressions in human beings. We have fine-tuned the existing convolutional neural network model trained on the visual recognition dataset used in the ILSVRC2012 to two widely used facial expression datasets - CFEE and RaFD, which when trained and tested independently yielded test accuracies of 74.79% and 95.71%, respectively. Generalization of results was evident by training on one dataset and testing on the other. Further, the image product of the cropped faces and their visual saliency maps were computed u…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；Aberystwyth University（阿伯里斯特威斯大学）
Efficient video recognition is a hot-spot research topic with the explosive growth of multimedia data on the Internet and mobile devices. Most existing methods select the salient frames without awareness of the class-specific saliency scores, which neglect the implicit association between the saliency of frames and its belonging category. To alleviate this issue, we devise a novel Temporal Saliency Query (TSQ) mechanism, which introduces class-specific information to provide fine-grained cues for saliency measurement. Specifically, we model the class-specific saliency measuring process as a qu…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；NetEase（网易）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Recently, inspired by DETR variants, query-based end-to-end instance segmentation (QEIS) methods have outperformed CNN-based models on large-scale datasets. Yet they would lose efficacy when only a small amount of training data is available since it's hard for the crucial queries/kernels to learn localization and shape priors. To this end, this work offers a novel unsupervised pre-training solution for low-data regimes. Inspired by the recent success of the Prompting technique, we introduce a new pre-training method that boosts QEIS models by giving Saliency Prompt for queries/kernels. Our met…
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
It is challenging for artificial intelligence systems to achieve accurate video recognition under the scenario of low computation costs. Adaptive inference based efficient video recognition methods typically preview videos and focus on salient parts to reduce computation costs. Most existing works focus on complex networks learning with video classification based objectives. Taking all frames as positive samples, few of them pay attention to the discrimination between positive samples (salient frames) and negative samples (non-salient frames) in supervisions. To fill this gap, in this paper, w…
Image Landmark Recognition has been one of the most sought-after classification challenges in the field of vision and perception. After so many years of generic classification of buildings and monuments from images, people are now focussing upon fine-grained problems - recognizing the category of each building or monument. We proposed an ensemble network for the purpose of classification of Indian Landmark Images. To this end, our method gives robust classification by ensembling the predictions from Graph-Based Visual Saliency (GBVS) network alongwith supervised feature-based classification al…
Robust Saliency-Aware Distillation for Few-shot Fine-grained Visual Recognition
School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Brain and Affective Cognitive Research Center, Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室脑与情感认知研究中心）；Engineering Research Center of the Ministry of Education on Health Intelligent Perception and Paralleled Digital-Human（教育部健康智能感知与平行数字人工程研究中心）
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Efficient spatiotemporal modeling is an important yet challenging problem for video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods exploit neighboring feature differences to obtain motion clues for short-term temporal modeling with a simple convolution. However, only one local convolution is incapable of handling various kinds of actions because of the limited receptive field. Besides, action-irrelated noises brought by camera movement will also harm the quality of extracted motion features. In this paper, we propose a Temporal Saliency Integration (TSI) block, which mainly contains a S…
Insect pests recognition is necessary for crop protection in many areas of the world. In this paper we propose an automatic classifier based on the fusion between saliency methods and convolutional neural networks. Saliency methods are famous image processing algorithms that highlight the most relevant pixels of an image. In this paper, we use three different saliency methods as image preprocessing and create three different images for every saliency method. Hence, we create 3x3=9 new images for every original image to train different convolutional neural networks. We evaluate the performance …
School of Electronic Information and Artificial, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology（陕西科技大学电子信息与人工智能学院）；Shaanxi Joint Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology（陕西科技大学陕西省人工智能联合实验室）
Forensic iris recognition, as opposed to live iris recognition, is an emerging research area that leverages the discriminative power of iris biometrics to aid human examiners in their efforts to identify deceased persons. As a machine learning-based technique in a predominantly human-controlled task, forensic recognition serves as "back-up" to human expertise in the task of post-mortem identification. As such, the machine learning model must be (a) interpretable, and (b) post-mortem-specific, to account for changes in decaying eye tissue. In this work, we propose a method that satisfies both r…
We propose a novel approach based on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to recognize human actions in still images by predicting the future motion, and detecting the shape and location of the salient parts of the image. We make the following major contributions to this important area of research: (i) We use the predicted future motion in the static image (Walker et al., 2015) as a means of compensating for the missing temporal information, while using the saliency map to represent the the spatial information in the form of location and shape of what is predicted as significant. (ii) We c…
Recognizing facial action units (AUs) from spontaneous facial expressions is still a challenging problem. Most recently, CNNs have shown promise on facial AU recognition. However, the learned CNNs are often overfitted and do not generalize well to unseen subjects due to limited AU-coded training images. We proposed a novel Incremental Boosting CNN (IB-CNN) to integrate boosting into the CNN via an incremental boosting layer that selects discriminative neurons from the lower layer and is incrementally updated on successive mini-batches. In addition, a novel loss function that accounts for error…
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电气与电子工程学院）；Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
As an essential component of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), place recognition is crucial for robot navigation and autonomous driving. Existing methods often formulate visual place recognition as feature matching, which is computationally expensive for many robotic applications with limited computing power, e.g., autonomous driving and cleaning robot. Inspired by the fact that human beings always recognize a place by remembering salient regions or landmarks that are more attractive or interesting than others, we formulate visual place recognition as saliency re-identificat…
Saliency map detection, as a method for detecting important regions of an image, is used in many applications such as image classification and recognition. We propose that context detection could have an essential role in image saliency detection. This requires extraction of high level features. In this paper a saliency map is proposed, based on image context detection using semantic segmentation as a high level feature. Saliency map from semantic information is fused with color and contrast based saliency maps. The final saliency map is then generated. Simulation results for Pascal-voc11 imag…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering（电气、计算机与能源工程学院）
The human visual system employs a selective attention mechanism to understand the visual world in an eficient manner. In this paper, we show how computational models of this mechanism can be exploited for the computer vision application of scene recognition. First, we consider saliency weighting and saliency pruning, and provide a comparison of the performance of different attention models in these approaches in terms of classification accuracy. Pruning can achieve a high degree of computational savings without significantly sacrificing classification accuracy. In saliency weighting, however, …
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.（华为技术有限公司）
The saliency ranking task is recently proposed to study the visual behavior that humans would typically shift their attention over different objects of a scene based on their degrees of saliency. Existing approaches focus on learning either object-object or object-scene relations. Such a strategy follows the idea of object-based attention in Psychology, but it tends to favor those objects with strong semantics (e.g., humans), resulting in unrealistic saliency ranking. We observe that spatial attention works concurrently with object-based attention in the human visual recognition system. During…
Université de Bordeaux（波尔多大学）；LaBRI - UMR 5800 - CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心 波尔多计算机科学实验室（UMR 5800））；INCIA - UMR 5287 - CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心 神经认知整合与阿基坦成像研究所（UMR 5287））
The problem of object recognition in natural scenes has been recently successfully addressed with Deep Convolutional Neuronal Networks giving a significant break-through in recognition scores. The computational efficiency of Deep CNNs as a function of their depth, allows for their use in real-time applications. One of the key issues here is to reduce the number of windows selected from images to be submitted to a Deep CNN. This is usually solved by preliminary segmentation and selection of specific windows, having outstanding "objectiveness" or other value of indicators of possible location of…
Despite significant progress, image saliency detection still remains a challenging task in complex scenes and environments. Integrating multiple different but complementary cues, like RGB and Thermal (RGB-T), may be an effective way for boosting saliency detection performance. The current research in this direction, however, is limited by the lack of a comprehensive benchmark. This work contributes such a RGB-T image dataset, which includes 821 spatially aligned RGB-T image pairs and their ground truth annotations for saliency detection purpose. The image pairs are with high diversity recorded…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Lund University（隆德大学）
Systems based on bag-of-words models from image features collected at maxima of sparse interest point operators have been used successfully for both computer visual object and action recognition tasks. While the sparse, interest-point based approach to recognition is not inconsistent with visual processing in biological systems that operate in `saccade and fixate' regimes, the methodology and emphasis in the human and the computer vision communities remains sharply distinct. Here, we make three contributions aiming to bridge this gap. First, we complement existing state-of-the art large scale …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology（深圳先进技术研究院）
Text image super-resolution is a challenging yet open research problem in the computer vision community. In particular, low-resolution images hamper the performance of typical optical character recognition (OCR) systems. In this article, we summarize our entry to the ICDAR2015 Competition on Text Image Super-Resolution. Experiments are based on the provided ICDAR2015 TextSR dataset and the released Tesseract-OCR 3.02 system. We report that our winning entry of text image super-resolution framework has largely improved the OCR performance with low-resolution images used as input, reaching an OC…
We propose a state of the art method for intelligent object recognition and video surveillance based on human visual attention. Bottom up and top down attention are applied respectively in the process of acquiring interested object(saliency map) and object recognition. The revision of 4 channel PFT method is proposed for bottom up attention and enhances the speed and accuracy. Inhibit of return (IOR) is applied in judging the sequence of saliency object pop out. Euclidean distance of color distribution, object center coordinates and speed are considered in judging whether the target is match a…
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar（甘地纳格尔印度理工学院）
Saliency detection has drawn a lot of attention of researchers in various fields over the past several years. Saliency is the perceptual quality that makes an object, person to draw the attention of humans at the very sight. Salient object detection in an image has been used centrally in many computational photography and computer vision applications like video compression, object recognition and classification, object segmentation, adaptive content delivery, motion detection, content aware resizing, camouflage images and change blindness images to name a few. We propose a method to detect sal…
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
The challenge of fine-grained visual recognition often lies in discovering the key discriminative regions. While such regions can be automatically identified from a large-scale labeled dataset, a similar method might become less effective when only a few annotations are available. In low data regimes, a network often struggles to choose the correct regions for recognition and tends to overfit spurious correlated patterns from the training data. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes the self-boosting attention mechanism, a novel method for regularizing the network to focus on the key region…
High-quality saliency maps are essential in several machine learning application areas including explainable AI and weakly supervised object detection and segmentation. Many techniques have been developed to generate better saliency using neural networks. However, they are often limited to specific saliency visualisation methods or saliency issues. We propose a novel saliency enhancing approach called SESS (Saliency Enhancing with Scaling and Sliding). It is a method and model agnostic extension to existing saliency map generation methods. With SESS, existing saliency approaches become robust …
Institute of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学技术研究所）
As one of the fundamental problems in document analysis, scene character recognition has attracted considerable interests in recent years. But the problem is still considered to be extremely challenging due to many uncontrollable factors including glyph transformation, blur, noisy background, uneven illumination, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for boosting scene character recognition by learning canonical forms of glyphs, based on the fact that characters appearing in scene images are all derived from their corresponding canonical forms. Our key observation is that more dis…
LTRL: Boosting Long-tail Recognition via Reflective Learning
Beijing University of Chemical Technology（北京化工大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）
Universidad de Sevilla（塞维利亚大学）；Universidad Carlos III de Madrid（马德里卡洛斯三世大学）；Health Research Institute Gregorio Marañón（格雷戈里奥·马拉尼翁健康研究所）
In this paper, we face the problem of offline handwritten text recognition (HTR) in historical documents when few labeled samples are available and some of them contain errors in the train set. Three main contributions are developed. First we analyze how to perform transfer learning (TL) from a massive database to a smaller historical database, analyzing which layers of the model need a fine-tuning process. Second, we analyze methods to efficiently combine TL and data augmentation (DA). Finally, an algorithm to mitigate the effects of incorrect labelings in the training set is proposed. The me…
In recent years, significant progress has been made in face recognition, which can be partially attributed to the availability of large-scale labeled face datasets. However, since the faces in these datasets usually contain limited degree and types of variation, the resulting trained models generalize poorly to more realistic unconstrained face datasets. While collecting labeled faces with larger variations could be helpful, it is practically infeasible due to privacy and labor cost. In comparison, it is easier to acquire a large number of unlabeled faces from different domains, which could be…
Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）；NetEase Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Text detection and recognition are essential components of a modern OCR system. Most OCR approaches attempt to obtain accurate bounding boxes of text at the detection stage, which is used as the input of the text recognition stage. We observe that when using tight text bounding boxes as input, a text recognizer frequently fails to achieve optimal performance due to the inconsistency between bounding boxes and deep representations of text recognition. In this paper, we propose Box Adjuster, a reinforcement learning-based method for adjusting the shape of each text bounding box to make it more c…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；ACRV（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Data61（数据61）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Compared with laborious pixel-wise dense labeling, it is much easier to label data by scribbles, which only costs 1$\sim$2 seconds to label one image. However, using scribble labels to learn salient object detection has not been explored. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised salient object detection model to learn saliency from such annotations. In doing so, we first relabel an existing large-scale salient object detection dataset with scribbles, namely S-DUTS dataset. Since object structure and detail information is not identified by scribbles, directly training with scribble labels …
University of Catania（卡塔尼亚大学）；Simula Research Lab（Simula研究实验室）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）
This paper presents an approach for top-down saliency detection guided by visual classification tasks. We first learn how to compute visual saliency when a specific visual task has to be accomplished, as opposed to most state-of-the-art methods which assess saliency merely through bottom-up principles. Afterwards, we investigate if and to what extent visual saliency can support visual classification in nontrivial cases. To achieve this, we propose SalClassNet, a CNN framework consisting of two networks jointly trained: a) the first one computing top-down saliency maps from input images, and b)…
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Universite de Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）；Polytechnique Montreal（蒙特利尔高等理工学院）；ETS Montreal（蒙特利尔高等工程技术学院）
In this paper, we study the problem of image recognition with non-differentiable constraints. A lot of real-life recognition applications require a rich output structure with deterministic constraints that are discrete or modeled by a non-differentiable function. A prime example is recognizing digit sequences, which are restricted by such rules (e.g., \textit{container code detection}, \textit{social insurance number recognition}, etc.). We investigate the usefulness of adding non-differentiable constraints in learning for the task of digit sequence recognition. Toward this goal, we synthesize…
Centre for Vision Information Technology International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院视觉信息技术中心）
Scene-text recognition is remarkably better in Latin languages than the non-Latin languages due to several factors like multiple fonts, simplistic vocabulary statistics, updated data generation tools, and writing systems. This paper examines the possible reasons for low accuracy by comparing English datasets with non-Latin languages. We compare various features like the size (width and height) of the word images and word length statistics. Over the last decade, generating synthetic datasets with powerful deep learning techniques has tremendously improved scene-text recognition. Several control…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；the University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Visual saliency is a fundamental problem in both cognitive and computational sciences, including computer vision. In this paper, we discover that a high-quality visual saliency model can be learned from multiscale features extracted using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have had many successes in visual recognition tasks. For learning such saliency models, we introduce a neural network architecture, which has fully connected layers on top of CNNs responsible for feature extraction at three different scales. The penultimate layer of our neural network has been confirmed to be a…
University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Siemens AG, Corporate Technology（西门子股份公司，企业技术部）
Capsule Networks, as alternatives to Convolutional Neural Networks, have been proposed to recognize objects from images. The current literature demonstrates many advantages of CapsNets over CNNs. However, how to create explanations for individual classifications of CapsNets has not been well explored. The widely used saliency methods are mainly proposed for explaining CNN-based classifications; they create saliency map explanations by combining activation values and the corresponding gradients, e.g., Grad-CAM. These saliency methods require a specific architecture of the underlying classifiers…
