In this paper, we address the problem of image retrieval by learning images representation based on the activations of a Convolutional Neural Network. We present an end-to-end trainable network architecture that exploits a novel multi-scale local pooling based on NetVLAD and a triplet mining procedure based on samples difficulty to obtain an effective image representation. Extensive experiments show that our approach is able to reach state-of-the-art results on three standard datasets.
Max Planck Institute for Informatics(马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所)
Over the last two decades we have witnessed strong progress on modeling visual object classes, scenes and attributes that have significantly contributed to automated image understanding. On the other hand, surprisingly little progress has been made on incorporating a spatial representation and reasoning in the inference process. In this work, we propose a pooling interpretation of spatial relations and show how it improves image retrieval and annotations tasks involving spatial language. Due to the complexity of the spatial language, we argue for a learning-based approach that acquires a repre…
Jilian Technology Group(极链科技集团);Video++ AI Lab(Video++人工智能实验室)
It has been shown that image descriptors extracted by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve remarkable results for retrieval problems. In this paper, we apply attention mechanism to CNN, which aims at enhancing more relevant features that correspond to important keypoints in the input image. The generated attention-aware features are then aggregated by the previous state-of-the-art generalized mean (GeM) pooling followed by normalization to produce a compact global descriptor, which can be efficiently compared to other image descriptors by the dot product. An extensive comparison of our…
This paper presents a new version of Dropout called Split Dropout (sDropout) and rotational convolution techniques to improve CNNs' performance on image classification. The widely used standard Dropout has advantage of preventing deep neural networks from overfitting by randomly dropping units during training. Our sDropout randomly splits the data into two subsets and keeps both rather than discards one subset. We also introduce two rotational convolution techniques, i.e. rotate-pooling convolution (RPC) and flip-rotate-pooling convolution (FRPC) to boost CNNs' performance on the robustness fo…
A Synergistic CNN-Transformer Network with Pooling Attention Fusion for Hyperspectral Image Classification
College of Engineering(工程学院);School of Electronic Information and Communications(电子信息与通信学院);Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics(长春光学精密机械与物理研究所);School of Computer Science and Technology(计算机科学与技术学院);School of Intelligent Manufacturing and Electrical Engineering(智能制造与电气工程学院)
Microsoft Research(微软研究院);Xi’an Jiaotong University(西安交通大学);University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学技术大学)
Existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require a fixed-size (e.g., 224x224) input image. This requirement is "artificial" and may reduce the recognition accuracy for the images or sub-images of an arbitrary size/scale. In this work, we equip the networks with another pooling strategy, "spatial pyramid pooling", to eliminate the above requirement. The new network structure, called SPP-net, can generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size/scale. Pyramid pooling is also robust to object deformations. With these advantages, SPP-net should in general improve all CNN-b…
This paper addresses the problem of very large-scale image retrieval, focusing on improving its accuracy and robustness. We target enhanced robustness of search to factors such as variations in illumination, object appearance and scale, partial occlusions, and cluttered backgrounds - particularly important when search is performed across very large datasets with significant variability. We propose a novel CNN-based global descriptor, called REMAP, which learns and aggregates a hierarchy of deep features from multiple CNN layers, and is trained end-to-end with a triplet loss. REMAP explicitly l…
In this paper, we propose a novel Global Norm-Aware Pooling (GNAP) block, which reweights local features in a convolutional neural network (CNN) adaptively according to their L2 norms and outputs a global feature vector with a global average pooling layer. Our GNAP block is designed to give dynamic weights to local features in different spatial positions without losing spatial symmetry. We use a GNAP block in a face feature embedding CNN to produce discriminative face feature vectors for pose-robust face recognition. The GNAP block is of very cheap computational cost, but it is very powerful f…
NIRMAL Pooling: An Adaptive Max Pooling Approach with Non-linear Activation for Enhanced Image Classification
ThinkAI - A Machine Learning Community(ThinkAI - 一个机器学习社区);Guru Nanak Institute of Technology(古鲁纳克技术学院);Department of Computer Science, Narayan Zantye College(计算机科学系,纳拉扬赞蒂学院);NIIT Foundation(NIIT基金会);Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering(Dayananda Sagar工程学院);IILM;Sri Balaji University(Sri Balaji大学);University of Calcutta(加尔各答大学);Mardin Artuklu University(马林艺术鲁大学);City University of Hong Kong(香港城市大学);Yenepoya (Deemed to be University)(Yenepoya(认定大学));Aston University(阿斯顿大学);Delhi Technical Campus(德里技术校区);Lovely Professional University(洛丽专业大学)
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in many computer vision tasks. However, this achievement is preceded by extreme manual annotation in order to perform either training from scratch or fine-tuning for the target task. In this work, we propose to fine-tune CNN for image retrieval from a large collection of unordered images in a fully automated manner. We employ state-of-the-art retrieval and Structure-from-Motion (SfM) methods to obtain 3D models, which are used to guide the selection of the training data for CNN fine-tuning. We show that both hard positiv…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学);Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院);West Virginia University(西弗吉尼亚大学);Baidu Research(百度研究院)
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is an extremely challenging task. Recently, some Vision Transformers (ViT) have been explored for FER, but most of them perform inferiorly compared to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). This is mainly because the new proposed modules are difficult to converge well from scratch due to lacking inductive bias and easy to focus on the occlusion and noisy areas. TransFER, a representative transformer-based method for FER, alleviates this with multi-branch attention dropping but brings excessive computations. On the contrary, we present two attentive…
Image descriptors based on activations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become dominant in image retrieval due to their discriminative power, compactness of representation, and search efficiency. Training of CNNs, either from scratch or fine-tuning, requires a large amount of annotated data, where a high quality of annotation is often crucial. In this work, we propose to fine-tune CNNs for image retrieval on a large collection of unordered images in a fully automated manner. Reconstructed 3D models obtained by the state-of-the-art retrieval and structure-from-motion methods guide t…
University of Technology at Sydney(悉尼科技大学);University of Texas at San Antonio(德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校)
In the early days, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) was studied with global features. Since 2003, image retrieval based on local descriptors (de facto SIFT) has been extensively studied for over a decade due to the advantage of SIFT in dealing with image transformations. Recently, image representations based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) have attracted increasing interest in the community and demonstrated impressive performance. Given this time of rapid evolution, this article provides a comprehensive survey of instance retrieval over the last decade. Two broad categories, SIFT…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology(斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院);Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms(蒙特利尔学习算法研究院)
In this work we propose a new architecture for person re-identification. As the task of re-identification is inherently associated with embedding learning and non-rigid appearance description, our architecture is based on the deep bilinear convolutional network (Bilinear-CNN) that has been proposed recently for fine-grained classification of highly non-rigid objects. While the last stages of the original Bilinear-CNN architecture completely removes the geometric information from consideration by performing orderless pooling, we observe that a better embedding can be learned by performing bilin…
Shenzhen University(深圳大学);Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence & Robotics for Society(深圳人工智能与机器人研究院);Malong Technologies(码隆科技)
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are generally prone to noise interruptions, i.e., small image noise can cause drastic changes in the output. To suppress the noise effect to the final predication, we enhance CNNs by replacing max-pooling, strided-convolution, and average-pooling with Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). We present general DWT and Inverse DWT (IDWT) layers applicable to various wavelets like Haar, Daubechies, and Cohen, etc., and design wavelet integrated CNNs (WaveCNets) using these layers for image classification. In WaveCNets, feature maps are decomposed into the low-freque…
An image retrieval method based on convolution neural network and dimension reduction is proposed in this paper. Convolution neural network is used to extract high-level features of images, and to solve the problem that the extracted feature dimensions are too high and have strong correlation, multilinear principal component analysis is used to reduce the dimension of features. The features after dimension reduction are binary hash coded for fast image retrieval. Experiments show that the method proposed in this paper has better retrieval effect than the retrieval method based on principal com…
Feature detectors and descriptors have been successfully used for various computer vision tasks, such as video object tracking and content-based image retrieval. Many methods use image gradients in different stages of the detection-description pipeline to describe local image structures. Recently, some, or all, of these stages have been replaced by convolutional neural networks (CNNs), in order to increase their performance. A detector is defined as a selection problem, which makes it more challenging to implement as a CNN. They are therefore generally defined as regressors, converting input i…
University of Jena(耶拿大学);UC Berkeley(加州大学伯克利分校);Carl Zeiss AG(卡尔蔡司股份公司)
Most recent CNN architectures use average pooling as a final feature encoding step. In the field of fine-grained recognition, however, recent global representations like bilinear pooling offer improved performance. In this paper, we generalize average and bilinear pooling to "alpha-pooling", allowing for learning the pooling strategy during training. In addition, we present a novel way to visualize decisions made by these approaches. We identify parts of training images having the highest influence on the prediction of a given test image. It allows for justifying decisions to users and also fo…
Several recent approaches showed how the representations learned by Convolutional Neural Networks can be repurposed for novel tasks. Most commonly it has been shown that the activation features of the last fully connected layers (fc7 or fc6) of the network, followed by a linear classifier outperform the state-of-the-art on several recognition challenge datasets. Instead of recognition, this paper focuses on the image retrieval problem and proposes a examines alternative pooling strategies derived for CNN features. The presented scheme uses the features maps from an earlier layer 5 of the CNN a…
Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication. University of Milano - Bicocca(米兰比可卡大学信息学、系统与传播系)
In this paper we present an extensive evaluation of visual descriptors for the content-based retrieval of remote sensing (RS) images. The evaluation includes global hand-crafted, local hand-crafted, and Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs) features coupled with four different Content-Based Image Retrieval schemes. We conducted all the experiments on two publicly available datasets: the 21-class UC Merced Land Use/Land Cover (LandUse) dataset and 19-class High-resolution Satellite Scene dataset (SceneSat). The content of RS images might be quite heterogeneous, ranging from images containing fine…
We address representation learning for large-scale instance-level image retrieval. Apart from backbone, training pipelines and loss functions, popular approaches have focused on different spatial pooling and attention mechanisms, which are at the core of learning a powerful global image representation. There are different forms of attention according to the interaction of elements of the feature tensor (local and global) and the dimensions where it is applied (spatial and channel). Unfortunately, each study addresses only one or two forms of attention and applies it to different problems like …
Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing(智能感知与计算研究中心);Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院自动化研究所)
Previous work has shown that feature maps of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be interpreted as feature representation of a particular image region. Features aggregated from these feature maps have been exploited for image retrieval tasks and achieved state-of-the-art performances in recent years. The key to the success of such methods is the feature representation. However, the different factors that impact the effectiveness of features are still not explored thoroughly. There are much less discussion about the best combination of them. The main contribution of our paper is the t…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科技大学);Shenzhen Zhuke Innovation Technology (Altizure)(深圳珠科创新科技(Altizure))
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved superior performance on object image retrieval, while Bag-of-Words (BoW) models with handcrafted local features still dominate the retrieval of overlapping images in 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we narrow down this gap by presenting an efficient CNN-based method to retrieve images with overlaps, which we refer to as the matchable image retrieval problem. Different from previous methods that generates training data based on sparse reconstruction, we create a large-scale image database with rich 3D geometrics and exploit information from su…
The current models of image representation based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have shown tremendous performance in image retrieval. Such models are inspired by the information flow along the visual pathway in the human visual cortex. We propose that in the field of particular object retrieval, the process of extracting CNN representations from query images with a given region of interest (ROI) can also be modelled by taking inspiration from human vision. Particularly, we show that by making the CNN pay attention on the ROI while extracting query image representation leads to signific…
Institute for Infocomm Research (A*STAR)(信息通信研究院(新加坡科技研究局));Université Pierre et Marie Curie(皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学)
With deep learning becoming the dominant approach in computer vision, the use of representations extracted from Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs) is quickly gaining ground on Fisher Vectors (FVs) as favoured state-of-the-art global image descriptors for image instance retrieval. While the good performance of CNNs for image classification are unambiguously recognised, which of the two has the upper hand in the image retrieval context is not entirely clear yet. In this work, we propose a comprehensive study that systematically evaluates FVs and CNNs for image retrieval. The first part compares th…
The College of Information Engineering, Xiangtan University(湘潭大学信息工程学院)
Rapid increase of digitized document give birth to high demand of document image retrieval. While conventional document image retrieval approaches depend on complex OCR-based text recognition and text similarity detection, this paper proposes a new content-based approach, in which more attention is paid to features extraction and fusion. In the proposed approach, multiple features of document images are extracted by different CNN models. After that, the extracted CNN features are reduced and fused into weighted average feature. Finally, the document images are ranked based on feature similarit…
The conventional spatial convolution layers in the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are computationally expensive at the point where the training time could take days unless the number of layers, the number of training images or the size of the training images are reduced. The image size of 256x256 pixels is commonly used for most of the applications of CNN, but this image size is too small for applications like Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) classification where the image details are important for accurate classification. This research proposed Frequency Domain Convolution (FDC) and Frequency …
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been more and more applied in mobile robotics such as intelligent vehicles. Security of CNNs in robotics applications is an important issue, for which potential adversarial attacks on CNNs are worth research. Pooling is a typical step of dimension reduction and information discarding in CNNs. Such information discarding may result in mis-deletion and mis-preservation of data features which largely influence the output of the network. This may aggravate the vulnerability of CNNs to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we conduct adversarial attacks on CNN…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill(北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校);University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign(伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校)
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown their promise as a universal representation for recognition. However, global CNN activations lack geometric invariance, which limits their robustness for classification and matching of highly variable scenes. To improve the invariance of CNN activations without degrading their discriminative power, this paper presents a simple but effective scheme called multi-scale orderless pooling (MOP-CNN). This scheme extracts CNN activations for local patches at multiple scale levels, performs orderless VLAD pooling of these activations at each level se…
School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University(西安电子科技大学电子工程学院);Xi’an, 710071, China(中国西安710071(注:此处地址信息按要求不提取,仅保留明确机构))
Convolution utilizes a shift-equivalent prior of images, thus leading to great success in image processing tasks. However, commonly used poolings in convolutional neural networks (CNNs), such as max-pooling, average-pooling, and strided-convolution, are not shift-equivalent. Thus, the shift-equivalence of CNNs is destroyed when convolutions and poolings are stacked. Moreover, anti-aliasing is another essential property of poolings from the perspective of signal processing. However, recent poolings are neither shift-equivalent nor anti-aliasing. To address this issue, we propose a new pooling m…
Tianjin University(天津大学);Dalian University of Technology(大连理工大学);Harbin Institute of Technology(哈尔滨工业大学)
Recent works have demonstrated that global covariance pooling (GCP) has the ability to improve performance of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on visual classification task. Despite considerable advance, the reasons on effectiveness of GCP on deep CNNs have not been well studied. In this paper, we make an attempt to understand what deep CNNs benefit from GCP in a viewpoint of optimization. Specifically, we explore the effect of GCP on deep CNNs in terms of the Lipschitzness of optimization loss and the predictiveness of gradients, and show that GCP can make the optimization landscape …
Center for Machine Perception(机器感知中心);FEE CTU Prague(捷克布拉格技术大学电子工程学院);Irisa Rennes(雷恩信息与随机系统研究所);Facebook AI Research(脸书人工智能研究院);Inria(法国国家信息与自动化研究所)
Recently, image representation built upon Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been shown to provide effective descriptors for image search, outperforming pre-CNN features as short-vector representations. Yet such models are not compatible with geometry-aware re-ranking methods and still outperformed, on some particular object retrieval benchmarks, by traditional image search systems relying on precise descriptor matching, geometric re-ranking, or query expansion. This work revisits both retrieval stages, namely initial search and re-ranking, by employing the same primitive information deriv…
In recent years, there has been widespread attention drawn to convolutional neural network (CNN) based blind image quality assessment (IQA). A large number of works start by extracting deep features from CNN. Then, those features are processed through spatial average pooling (SAP) and fully connected layers to predict quality. Inspired by full reference IQA and texture features, in this paper, we extend SAP ($1^{st}$ moment) into spatial moment pooling (SMP) by incorporating higher order moments (such as variance, skewness). Moreover, we provide learning friendly normalization to circumvent nu…
This paper presents an investigation of several techniques that increase the accuracy of online handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR). We propose a new training strategy named DropDistortion to train a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) with distorted samples. DropDistortion gradually lowers the degree of character distortion during training, which allows the DCNN to better generalize. Path signature is used to extract effective features for online characters. Further improvement is achieved by employing spatial stochastic max-pooling as a method of feature map distortion and …
Currently, owing to the ubiquity of mobile devices, online handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) has become one of the suitable choice for feeding input to cell phones and tablet devices. Over the past few years, larger and deeper convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have extensively been employed for improving character recognition performance. However, its substantial storage requirement is a significant obstacle in deploying such networks into portable electronic devices. To circumvent this problem, we propose a novel technique called DropWeight for pruning redundant connections …
Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学);University of Texas at Austin(得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校)
In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown superior capability in visual learning tasks. While accuracy-wise CNNs provide unprecedented performance, they are also known to be computationally intensive and energy demanding for modern computer systems. In this paper, we propose Virtual Pooling (ViP), a model-level approach to improve speed and energy consumption of CNN-based image classification and object detection tasks, with a provable error bound. We show the efficacy of ViP through experiments on four CNN models, three representative datasets, both desktop and mobile p…
Shenzhen University(深圳大学);Norwegian Research Center(挪威研究中心)
Promising results for subjective image quality prediction have been achieved during the past few years by using convolutional neural networks (CNN). However, the use of CNNs for high resolution image quality assessment remains a challenge, since typical CNN architectures have been designed for small resolution input images. In this study, we propose an image quality model that attempts to mimic the attention mechanism of human visual system (HVS) by using a recurrent neural network (RNN) for spatial pooling of the features extracted from different spatial areas (patches) by a deep CNN-based fe…
Pooling is essentially an operation from the field of Mathematical Morphology, with max pooling as a limited special case. The more general setting of MorphPooling greatly extends the tool set for building neural networks. In addition to pooling operations, encoder-decoder networks used for pixel-level predictions also require unpooling. It is common to combine unpooling with convolution or deconvolution for up-sampling. However, using its morphological properties, unpooling can be generalised and improved. Extensive experimentation on two tasks and three large-scale datasets shows that morpho…
Ryerson University(瑞尔森大学);Vector Institute for AI(向量人工智能研究所);York University(约克大学);Toronto AI Lab, LG Electronics(LG电子多伦多人工智能实验室);Samsung AI Centre Toronto(三星多伦多人工智能中心);University of Guelph(圭尔夫大学)
In this paper, we challenge the common assumption that collapsing the spatial dimensions of a 3D (spatial-channel) tensor in a convolutional neural network (CNN) into a vector via global pooling removes all spatial information. Specifically, we demonstrate that positional information is encoded based on the ordering of the channel dimensions, while semantic information is largely not. Following this demonstration, we show the real world impact of these findings by applying them to two applications. First, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy and loss function which impr…
University of Wollongong(卧龙岗大学);University of Electronic Science and Technology of China(电子科技大学)
Pooling is an important component in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for aggregating features and reducing computational burden. Compared with other components such as convolutional layers and fully connected layers which are completely learned from data, the pooling component is still handcrafted such as max pooling and average pooling. This paper proposes a learnable pooling function using recurrent neural networks (RNN) so that the pooling can be fully adapted to data and other components of the network, leading to an improved performance. Such a network with learnable pooling function…
Australian Center for Robotic Vision(澳大利亚机器人视觉中心);The Australian National University(澳大利亚国立大学);Data61/CSIRO(Data61/澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织)
Most successful deep learning algorithms for action recognition extend models designed for image-based tasks such as object recognition to video. Such extensions are typically trained for actions on single video frames or very short clips, and then their predictions from sliding-windows over the video sequence are pooled for recognizing the action at the sequence level. Usually this pooling step uses the first-order statistics of frame-level action predictions. In this paper, we explore the advantages of using higher-order correlations; specifically, we introduce Higher-order Kernel (HOK) desc…
The encoding of local features is an essential part for writer identification and writer retrieval. While CNN activations have already been used as local features in related works, the encoding of these features has attracted little attention so far. In this work, we compare the established VLAD encoding with triangulation embedding. We further investigate generalized max pooling as an alternative to sum pooling and the impact of decorrelation and Exemplar SVMs. With these techniques, we set new standards on two publicly available datasets (ICDAR13, KHATT).
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) features have been successfully employed in recent works as an image descriptor for various vision tasks. But the inability of the deep CNN features to exhibit invariance to geometric transformations and object compositions poses a great challenge for image search. In this work, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the objectness prior over the deep CNN features of image regions for obtaining an invariant image representation. The proposed approach represents the image as a vector of pooled CNN features describing the underlying objects. This representation pr…
National Institute of Technology Trichy(特里奇国家理工学院);Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad(帕拉卡德印度理工学院)
With the introduction of anti-aliased convolutional neural networks (CNN), there has been some resurgence in relooking the way pooling is done in CNNs. The fundamental building block of the anti-aliased CNN has been the application of Gaussian smoothing before the pooling operation to reduce the distortion due to aliasing thereby making CNNs shift invariant. Wavelet based approaches have also been proposed as a possibility of additional noise removal capability and gave interesting results for even segmentation tasks. However, all the approaches proposed completely remove the high frequency co…
Tsinghua University(清华大学);University of Technology Sydney(悉尼科技大学);University of Texas at San Antonio(德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校)
Employing part-level features for pedestrian image description offers fine-grained information and has been verified as beneficial for person retrieval in very recent literature. A prerequisite of part discovery is that each part should be well located. Instead of using external cues, e.g., pose estimation, to directly locate parts, this paper lays emphasis on the content consistency within each part. Specifically, we target at learning discriminative part-informed features for person retrieval and make two contributions. (i) A network named Part-based Convolutional Baseline (PCB). Given an im…
Inspired by the success of recent vision transformers and large kernel design in convolutional neural networks (CNNs), in this paper, we analyze and explore essential reasons for their success. We claim two factors that are critical for 3D large-scale scene understanding: a larger receptive field and operations with greater non-linearity. The former is responsible for providing long range contexts and the latter can enhance the capacity of the network. To achieve the above properties, we propose a simple yet effective long range pooling (LRP) module using dilation max pooling, which provides a…
The University of Queensland(昆士兰大学);The University of Adelaide(阿德莱德大学);Australian Centre for Robotic Vision(澳大利亚机器人视觉中心)
Encouraged by the success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in image classification, recently much effort is spent on applying CNNs to video based action recognition problems. One challenge is that video contains a varying number of frames which is incompatible to the standard input format of CNNs. Existing methods handle this issue either by directly sampling a fixed number of frames or bypassing this issue by introducing a 3D convolutional layer which conducts convolution in spatial-temporal domain. To solve this issue, here we propose a novel network structure which allows an arbitrar…
Missouri University of Science and Technology(密苏里科技大学)
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made resounding success in many computer vision tasks such as image classification and object detection. However, their performance degrades rapidly on tougher tasks where images are of low resolution or objects are small. In this paper, we point out that this roots in a defective yet common design in existing CNN architectures, namely the use of strided convolution and/or pooling layers, which results in a loss of fine-grained information and learning of less effective feature representations. To this end, we propose a new CNN building block called SP…
The task of fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) deals with classification problems that display a small inter-class variance such as distinguishing between different bird species or car models. State-of-the-art approaches typically tackle this problem by integrating an elaborate attention mechanism or (part-) localization method into a standard convolutional neural network (CNN). Also in this work the aim is to enhance the performance of a backbone CNN such as ResNet by including three efficient and lightweight components specifically designed for FGVC. This is achieved by using global k…
In this work, we present novel temporal encoding methods for action and activity classification by extending the unsupervised rank pooling temporal encoding method in two ways. First, we present "discriminative rank pooling" in which the shared weights of our video representation and the parameters of the action classifiers are estimated jointly for a given training dataset of labelled vector sequences using a bilevel optimization formulation of the learning problem. When the frame level features vectors are obtained from a convolutional neural network (CNN), we rank pool the network activatio…
Tianjin University(天津大学);Dalian University of Technology(大连理工大学);Harbin Institute of Technology(哈尔滨工业大学);The Hong Kong Polytechnic University(香港理工大学)
Compared with global average pooling in existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), global covariance pooling can capture richer statistics of deep features, having potential for improving representation and generalization abilities of deep CNNs. However, integration of global covariance pooling into deep CNNs brings two challenges: (1) robust covariance estimation given deep features of high dimension and small sample size; (2) appropriate usage of geometry of covariances. To address these challenges, we propose a global Matrix Power Normalized COVariance (MPN-COV) Pooling. Our MPN-CO…
The University of Tokyo(东京大学);NTT Communications Science Laboratories(NTT通信科学实验室)
Convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures utilize downsampling layers, which restrict the subsequent layers to learn spatially invariant features while reducing computational costs. However, such a downsampling operation makes it impossible to use the full spectrum of input features. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel layer called parallel grid pooling (PGP) which is applicable to various CNN models. PGP performs downsampling without discarding any intermediate feature. It works as data augmentation and is complementary to commonly used data augmentation techniques. Furth…
Australian Centre for Robotic Vision(澳大利亚机器人视觉中心);The Australian National University(澳大利亚国立大学)
Deep learning models for video-based action recognition usually generate features for short clips (consisting of a few frames); such clip-level features are aggregated to video-level representations by computing statistics on these features. Typically zero-th (max) or the first-order (average) statistics are used. In this paper, we explore the benefits of using second-order statistics. Specifically, we propose a novel end-to-end learnable feature aggregation scheme, dubbed temporal correlation pooling that generates an action descriptor for a video sequence by capturing the similarities betwee…
Utrecht University(乌得勒支大学);University of Warwick(华威大学)
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) use pooling to decrease the size of activation maps. This process is crucial to increase the receptive fields and to reduce computational requirements of subsequent convolutions. An important feature of the pooling operation is the minimization of information loss, with respect to the initial activation maps, without a significant impact on the computation and memory overhead. To meet these requirements, we propose SoftPool: a fast and efficient method for exponentially weighted activation downsampling. Through experiments across a range of architectures an…