Context matters! Nevertheless, there has not been much research in exploiting contextual information in deep neural networks. For most part, the entire usage of contextual information has been limited to recurrent neural networks. Attention models and capsule networks are two recent ways of introducing contextual information in non-recurrent models, however both of these algorithms have been developed after this work has started.
In this thesis, we show that contextual information can be exploited in 2 fundamentally different ways: implicitly and explicitly. In the DeepScore project, where the usage of context is very important for the recognition of many tiny objects, we show that by carefully crafting convolutional architectures, we can achieve state-of-the-art results, while also being able to implicitly correctly distinguish between objects which are virtually identical, but have different meanings based on their surrounding. In parallel, we show that by explicitly designing algorithms (motivated from graph theory and game theory) that take into considerations the entire structure of the dataset, we can achieve state-of-the-art results in different topics like semi-supervised learning and similarity learning.
To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to integrate graph-theoretical modules, carefully crafted for the problem of similarity learning and that are designed to consider contextual information, not only outperforming the other models, but also gaining a speed improvement while using a smaller number of parameters.
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
In this paper, we propose one novel model for point cloud semantic segmentation, which exploits both the local and global structures within the point cloud based on the contextual point representations. Specifically, we enrich each point representation by performing one novel gated fusion on the point itself and its contextual points. Afterwards, based on the enriched representation, we propose one novel graph pointnet module, relying on the graph attention block to dynamically compose and update each point representation within the local point cloud structure. Finally, we resort to the spatia…
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar（印度理工学院甘地讷格尔分校）
Recently, there is a vast interest in developing image feature learning methods that are independent of the training data, such as deep image prior, InGAN, SinGAN, and DCIL. These methods are unsupervised and are used to perform low-level vision tasks such as image restoration, image editing, and image synthesis. In this work, we proposed a new training data-independent framework, called Deep Contextual Features Learning (DeepCFL), to perform image synthesis and image restoration based on the semantics of the input image. The contextual features are simply the high dimensional vectors represen…
Designed as extremely deep architectures, deep residual networks which provide a rich visual representation and offer robust convergence behaviors have recently achieved exceptional performance in numerous computer vision problems. Being directly applied to a scene labeling problem, however, they were limited to capture long-range contextual dependence, which is a critical aspect. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, Contextual Recurrent Residual Networks (CRRN) which is able to simultaneously handle rich visual representation learning and long-range context modeling within a fu…
Traditional saliency models usually adopt hand-crafted image features and human-designed mechanisms to calculate local or global contrast. In this paper, we propose a novel computational saliency model, i.e., deep spatial contextual long-term recurrent convolutional network (DSCLRCN) to predict where people looks in natural scenes. DSCLRCN first automatically learns saliency related local features on each image location in parallel. Then, in contrast with most other deep network based saliency models which infer saliency in local contexts, DSCLRCN can mimic the cortical lateral inhibition mech…
Object detection is one of the most active areas in computer vision, which has made significant improvement in recent years. Current state-of-the-art object detection methods mostly adhere to the framework of regions with convolutional neural network (R-CNN) and only use local appearance features inside object bounding boxes. Since these approaches ignore the contextual information around the object proposals, the outcome of these detectors may generate a semantically incoherent interpretation of the input image. In this paper, we propose an ensemble object detection system which incorporates …
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；National Institutes of Health Clinical Center（国立卫生研究院临床中心）
Deep neural networks have demonstrated very promising performance on accurate segmentation of challenging organs (e.g., pancreas) in abdominal CT and MRI scans. The current deep learning approaches conduct pancreas segmentation by processing sequences of 2D image slices independently through deep, dense per-pixel masking for each image, without explicitly enforcing spatial consistency constraint on segmentation of successive slices. We propose a new convolutional/recurrent neural network architecture to address the contextual learning and segmentation consistency problem. A deep convolutional …
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究院）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）
Human-object interaction detection is an important and relatively new class of visual relationship detection tasks, essential for deeper scene understanding. Most existing approaches decompose the problem into object localization and interaction recognition. Despite showing progress, these approaches only rely on the appearances of humans and objects and overlook the available context information, crucial for capturing subtle interactions between them. We propose a contextual attention framework for human-object interaction detection. Our approach leverages context by learning contextually-awa…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Electron tomography (ET) allows high-resolution reconstructions of macromolecular complexes at nearnative state. Cellular structures segmentation in the reconstruction data from electron tomographic images is often required for analyzing and visualizing biological structures, making it a powerful tool for quantitative descriptions of whole cell structures and understanding biological functions. However, these cellular structures are rather difficult to automatically separate or quantify from view owing to complex molecular environment and the limitations of reconstruction data of ET. In this p…
In this paper, we propose an approach that exploits object segmentation in order to improve the accuracy of object detection. We frame the problem as inference in a Markov Random Field, in which each detection hypothesis scores object appearance as well as contextual information using Convolutional Neural Networks, and allows the hypothesis to choose and score a segment out of a large pool of accurate object segmentation proposals. This enables the detector to incorporate additional evidence when it is available and thus results in more accurate detections. Our experiments show an improvement …
DCVC-MV: Deep Contextual Multiview Video Compression with Efficient Inter-View Prediction
Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（城市大学计算机科学系）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Ningbo University（宁波大学电子工程与计算机科学学院）
NVIDIA AI Technology Center（英伟达人工智能技术中心）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Lesion detection from computed tomography (CT) scans is challenging compared to natural object detection because of two major reasons: small lesion size and small inter-class variation. Firstly, the lesions usually only occupy a small region in the CT image. The feature of such small region may not be able to provide sufficient information due to its limited spatial feature resolution. Secondly, in CT scans, the lesions are often indistinguishable from the background since the lesion and non-lesion areas may have very similar appearances. To tackle both problems, we need to enrich the feature …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Accurate and reliable image segmentation is an essential part of biomedical image analysis. In this paper, we consider the problem of biomedical image segmentation using deep convolutional neural networks. We propose a new end-to-end network architecture that effectively integrates local and global contextual patterns of histologic primitives to obtain a more reliable segmentation result. Specifically, we introduce a deep fully convolution residual network with a new skip connection strategy to control the contextual information passed forward. Moreover, our trained model is also computational…
Bilkent University（比尔肯特大学）；National Magnetic Resonance Research Center (UMRAM)（国家磁共振研究中心（UMRAM））；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Hacettepe University（哈塞特佩大学）
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers the flexibility to image a given anatomic volume under a multitude of tissue contrasts. Yet, scan time considerations put stringent limits on the quality and diversity of MRI data. The gold-standard approach to alleviate this limitation is to recover high-quality images from data undersampled across various dimensions, most commonly the Fourier domain or contrast sets. A primary distinction among recovery methods is whether the anatomy is processed per volume or per cross-section. Volumetric models offer enhanced capture of global contextual information,…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Texas at San Antonio（德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校）
In the Bag-of-Words (BoW) model based image retrieval task, the precision of visual matching plays a critical role in improving retrieval performance. Conventionally, local cues of a keypoint are employed. However, such strategy does not consider the contextual evidences of a keypoint, a problem which would lead to the prevalence of false matches. To address this problem, this paper defines "true match" as a pair of keypoints which are similar on three levels, i.e., local, regional, and global. Then, a principled probabilistic framework is established, which is capable of implicitly integratin…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Removing undesirable reflections from a single image captured through a glass window is of practical importance to visual computing systems. Although state-of-the-art methods can obtain decent results in certain situations, performance declines significantly when tackling more general real-world cases. These failures stem from the intrinsic difficulty of single image reflection removal -- the fundamental ill-posedness of the problem, and the insufficiency of densely-labeled training data needed for resolving this ambiguity within learning-based neural network pipelines. In this paper, we addre…
Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.（博思艾伦咨询公司）；Army Research Laboratory（陆军研究实验室）
In this paper, we describe a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) that is deeper and wider than other existing deep networks for hyperspectral image classification. Unlike current state-of-the-art approaches in CNN-based hyperspectral image classification, the proposed network, called contextual deep CNN, can optimally explore local contextual interactions by jointly exploiting local spatio-spectral relationships of neighboring individual pixel vectors. The joint exploitation of the spatio-spectral information is achieved by a multi-scale convolutional filter bank used as an initial c…
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar（印度理工学院甘地纳加尔分校）
Recently, there is a vast interest in developing methods which are independent of the training samples such as deep image prior, zero-shot learning, and internal learning. The methods above are based on the common goal of maximizing image features learning from a single image despite inherent technical diversity. In this work, we bridge the gap between the various unsupervised approaches above and propose a general framework for image restoration and image retargeting. We use contextual feature learning and internal learning to improvise the structure similarity between the source and the targ…
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Computational color constancy refers to the estimation of the scene illumination and makes the perceived color relatively stable under varying illumination. In the past few years, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have delivered superior performance in illuminant estimation. Several representative methods formulate it as a multi-label prediction problem by learning the local appearance of image patches using CNNs. However, these approaches inevitably make incorrect estimations for the ambiguous patches affected by their neighborhood contexts. Inaccurate local estimates are likely to br…
Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究）；fastMRI team（fastMRI团队）
Deep learning approaches to accelerated MRI take a matrix of sampled Fourier-space lines as input and produce a spatial image as output. In this work we show that by careful choice of the offset used in the sampling procedure, the symmetries in k-space can be better exploited, producing higher quality reconstructions than given by standard equally-spaced samples or randomized samples motivated by compressed sensing.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）；National Institutes of Health（美国国立卫生研究院）
Transrectal ultrasound (US) is the most commonly used imaging modality to guide prostate biopsy and its 3D volume provides even richer context information. Current methods for 3D volume reconstruction from freehand US scans require external tracking devices to provide spatial position for every frame. In this paper, we propose a deep contextual learning network (DCL-Net), which can efficiently exploit the image feature relationship between US frames and reconstruct 3D US volumes without any tracking device. The proposed DCL-Net utilizes 3D convolutions over a US video segment for feature extra…
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；TU Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）
Classification problems solved with deep neural networks (DNNs) typically rely on a closed world paradigm, and optimize over a single objective (e.g., minimization of the cross-entropy loss). This setup dismisses all kinds of supporting signals that can be used to reinforce the existence or absence of a particular pattern. The increasing need for models that are interpretable by design makes the inclusion of said contextual signals a crucial necessity. To this end, we introduce the notion of Self-Supervised Autogenous Learning (SSAL) models. A SSAL objective is realized through one or more add…
Although autoregressive models have achieved promising results on image generation, their unidirectional generation process prevents the resultant images from fully reflecting global contexts. To address the issue, we propose an effective image generation framework of Draft-and-Revise with Contextual RQ-transformer to consider global contexts during the generation process. As a generalized VQ-VAE, RQ-VAE first represents a high-resolution image as a sequence of discrete code stacks. After code stacks in the sequence are randomly masked, Contextual RQ-Transformer is trained to infill the masked…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Homography estimation is an important task in computer vision applications, such as image stitching, video stabilization, and camera calibration. Traditional homography estimation methods heavily depend on the quantity and distribution of feature correspondences, leading to poor robustness in low-texture scenes. The learning solutions, on the contrary, try to learn robust deep features but demonstrate unsatisfying performance in the scenes with low overlap rates. In this paper, we address these two problems simultaneously by designing a contextual correlation layer (CCL). The CCL can efficient…
Deep evidential fusion with uncertainty quantification and contextual discounting for multimodal medical image segmentation
Université de technologie de Compiègne（贡比涅技术大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Rouen Normandie（鲁昂诺曼底大学）；Centre Henri Becquerel（亨利·贝克勒尔中心）；Institut universitaire de France（法国大学研究院）
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）
We have created a large diverse set of cars from overhead images, which are useful for training a deep learner to binary classify, detect and count them. The dataset and all related material will be made publically available. The set contains contextual matter to aid in identification of difficult targets. We demonstrate classification and detection on this dataset using a neural network we call ResCeption. This network combines residual learning with Inception-style layers and is used to count cars in one look. This is a new way to count objects rather than by localization or density estimati…
Most of the existing neural video compression methods adopt the predictive coding framework, which first generates the predicted frame and then encodes its residue with the current frame. However, as for compression ratio, predictive coding is only a sub-optimal solution as it uses simple subtraction operation to remove the redundancy across frames. In this paper, we propose a deep contextual video compression framework to enable a paradigm shift from predictive coding to conditional coding. In particular, we try to answer the following questions: how to define, use, and learn condition under …
Typical person re-identification (re-ID) methods train a deep CNN to extract deep features and combine them with a distance metric for the final evaluation. In this work, we focus on exploiting the full information encoded in the deep feature to boost the re-ID performance. First, we propose a Deep Feature Fusion (DFF) method to exploit the diverse information embedded in a deep feature. DFF treats each sub-feature as an information carrier and employs a diffusion process to exchange their information. Second, we propose an Adaptive Re-Ranking (ARR) method to exploit the contextual information…
National University of Sciences and Technology（国家科技大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Pansharpening enhances spatial details of high spectral resolution multispectral images using features of high spatial resolution panchromatic image. There are a number of traditional pansharpening approaches but producing an image exhibiting high spectral and spatial fidelity is still an open problem. Recently, deep learning has been used to produce promising pansharpened images; however, most of these approaches apply similar treatment to both multispectral and panchromatic images by using the same network for feature extraction. In this work, we present present a novel dual attention-based …
Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院巴黎电信学院）；Laboratoire Hubert Curien（于贝尔·居里安实验室）
Deep learning approaches show unprecedented results for speckle reduction in SAR amplitude images. The wide availability of multi-temporal stacks of SAR images can improve even further the quality of denoising. In this paper, we propose a flexible yet efficient way to integrate temporal information into a deep neural network for speckle suppression. Archives provide access to long time-series of SAR images, from which multi-temporal averages can be computed with virtually no remaining speckle fluctuations. The proposed method combines this multi-temporal average and the image at a given date i…
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour（唐德斯大脑、认知与行为研究所）
Real-world objects occur in specific contexts. Such context has been shown to facilitate detection by constraining the locations to search. But can context directly benefit object detection? To do so, context needs to be learned independently from target features. This is impossible in traditional object detection where classifiers are trained on images containing both target features and surrounding context. In contrast, humans can learn context and target features separately, such as when we see highways without cars. Here we show for the first time that human-derived scene expectations can …
Overfitting is one of the most common problems when training deep neural networks on comparatively small datasets. Here, we demonstrate that neural network activation sparsity is a reliable indicator for overfitting which we utilize to propose novel targeted sparsity visualization and regularization strategies. Based on these strategies we are able to understand and counteract overfitting caused by activation sparsity and filter correlation in a targeted layer-by-layer manner. Our results demonstrate that targeted sparsity regularization can efficiently be used to regularize well-known dataset…
Image Captioning, or the automatic generation of descriptions for images, is one of the core problems in Computer Vision and has seen considerable progress using Deep Learning Techniques. We propose to use Inception-ResNet Convolutional Neural Network as encoder to extract features from images, Hierarchical Context based Word Embeddings for word representations and a Deep Stacked Long Short Term Memory network as decoder, in addition to using Image Data Augmentation to avoid over-fitting. For data Augmentation, we use Horizontal and Vertical Flipping in addition to Perspective Transformations …
