Automated species identification and delimitation is challenging, particularly in rare and thus often scarcely sampled species, which do not allow sufficient discrimination of infraspecific versus interspecific variation. Typical problems arising from either low or exaggerated interspecific morphological differentiation are best met by automated methods of machine learning that learn efficient and effective species identification from training samples. However, limited infraspecific sampling remains a key challenge also in machine learning. 1In this study, we assessed whether a two-level data augmentation approach may help to overcome the problem of scarce training data in automated visual species identification. The first level of visual data augmentation applies classic approaches of data augmentation and generation of faked images using a GAN approach. Descriptive feature vectors are derived from bottleneck features of a VGG-16 convolutional neural network (CNN) that are then stepwise reduced in dimensionality using Global Average Pooling and PCA to prevent overfitting. The second level of data augmentation employs synthetic additional sampling in feature space by an oversampling algorithm in vector space (SMOTE). Applied on two challenging datasets of scarab beetles (Coleoptera), our augmentation approach outperformed a non-augmented deep learning baseline approach as well as a traditional 2D morphometric approach (Procrustes analysis).
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）
Deep learning has revolutionized the performance of classification, but meanwhile demands sufficient labeled data for training. Given insufficient data, while many techniques have been developed to help combat overfitting, the challenge remains if one tries to train deep networks, especially in the ill-posed extremely low data regimes: only a small set of labeled data are available, and nothing -- including unlabeled data -- else. Such regimes arise from practical situations where not only data labeling but also data collection itself is expensive. We propose a deep adversarial data augmentati…
Courant Institute, New York University（纽约大学库朗研究所）；Imagen Technologies（伊马根科技公司）
Insufficient training data and severe class imbalance are often limiting factors when developing machine learning models for the classification of rare diseases. In this work, we address the problem of classifying bone lesions from X-ray images by increasing the small number of positive samples in the training set. We propose a generative data augmentation approach based on a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network that synthesizes bone lesions on images without pathology. We pose the generative task as an image-patch translation problem that we optimize specifically for distinct bones…
This paper investigates the issue of real-world identification to fulfill better species protection. We focus on plant species identification as it is a classic and hot issue. In tradition plant species identification the samples are scanned specimen and the background is simple. However, real-world species recognition is more challenging. We first systematically investigate what is realistic species recognition and the difference from tradition plant species recognition. To deal with the challenging task, an interdisciplinary collaboration is presented based on the latest advances in computer…
Despite remarkable progress on visual recognition tasks, deep neural-nets still struggle to generalize well when training data is scarce or highly imbalanced, rendering them extremely vulnerable to real-world examples. In this paper, we present a surprisingly simple yet highly effective method to mitigate this limitation: using pure noise images as additional training data. Unlike the common use of additive noise or adversarial noise for data augmentation, we propose an entirely different perspective by directly training on pure random noise images. We present a new Distribution-Aware Routing …
University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；Technical University of Denmark (DTU)（丹麦技术大学）；Virginia Commonwealth University（弗吉尼亚联邦大学）
The recognition of coral species based on underwater texture images pose a significant difficulty for machine learning algorithms, due to the three following challenges embedded in the nature of this data: 1) datasets do not include information about the global structure of the coral; 2) several species of coral have very similar characteristics; and 3) defining the spatial borders between classes is difficult as many corals tend to appear together in groups. For this reason, the classification of coral species has always required an aid from a domain expert. The objective of this paper is to …
Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPMs) are frequently used in testing human's visual reasoning ability. Recent advances of RPM-like datasets and solution models partially address the challenges of visually understanding the RPM questions and logically reasoning the missing answers. In view of the poor generalization performance due to insufficient samples in RPM datasets, we propose an effective scheme, namely Candidate Answer Morphological Mixup (CAM-Mix). CAM-Mix serves as a data augmentation strategy by gray-scale image morphological mixup, which regularizes various solution methods and overco…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Tencent Youtu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）
Human pose estimation is the task of localizing body keypoints from still images. The state-of-the-art methods suffer from insufficient examples of challenging cases such as symmetric appearance, heavy occlusion and nearby person. To enlarge the amounts of challenging cases, previous methods augmented images by cropping and pasting image patches with weak semantics, which leads to unrealistic appearance and limited diversity. We instead propose Semantic Data Augmentation (SDA), a method that augments images by pasting segmented body parts with various semantic granularity. Furthermore, we prop…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Inceptio Tech.（嬴彻科技）
Real-world training data usually exhibits long-tailed distribution, where several majority classes have a significantly larger number of samples than the remaining minority classes. This imbalance degrades the performance of typical supervised learning algorithms designed for balanced training sets. In this paper, we address this issue by augmenting minority classes with a recently proposed implicit semantic data augmentation (ISDA) algorithm, which produces diversified augmented samples by translating deep features along many semantically meaningful directions. Importantly, given that ISDA es…
University of Agder（阿格德尔大学）；Institute of Marine Research（海洋研究所）
Our understanding and ability to effectively monitor and manage coastal ecosystems are severely limited by observation methods. Automatic recognition of species in natural environment is a promising tool which would revolutionize video and image analysis for a wide range of applications in marine ecology. However, classifying fish from images captured by underwater cameras is in general very challenging due to noise and illumination variations in water. Previous classification methods in the literature relies on filtering the images to separate the fish from the background or sharpening the im…
Instance segmentation is applied widely in image editing, image analysis and autonomous driving, etc. However, insufficient data is a common problem in practical applications. The Visual Inductive Priors(VIPriors) Instance Segmentation Challenge has focused on this problem. VIPriors for Data-Efficient Computer Vision Challenges ask competitors to train models from scratch in a data-deficient setting, but there are some visual inductive priors that can be used. In order to address the VIPriors instance segmentation problem, we designed a Task-Specific Data Augmentation(TS-DA) strategy and Infer…
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU)（西交利物浦大学）；Duke Kunshan University（昆山杜克大学）
Single-source domain generalization (SDG) in medical image segmentation is a challenging yet essential task as domain shifts are quite common among clinical image datasets. Previous attempts most conduct global-only/random augmentation. Their augmented samples are usually insufficient in diversity and informativeness, thus failing to cover the possible target domain distribution. In this paper, we rethink the data augmentation strategy for SDG in medical image segmentation. Motivated by the class-level representation invariance and style mutability of medical images, we hypothesize that unseen…
Automatic snake species recognition is important because it has vast potential to help lower deaths and disabilities caused by snakebites. We introduce our solution in SnakeCLEF 2022 for fine-grained snake species recognition on a heavy long-tailed class distribution. First, a network architecture is designed to extract and fuse features from multiple modalities, i.e. photograph from visual modality and geographic locality information from language modality. Then, logit adjustment based methods are studied to relieve the impact caused by the severe class imbalance. Next, a combination of super…
FAAGC: Feature Augmentation on Adaptive Geodesic Curve Based on the shape space theory
School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University（上海大学计算机工程与科学学院）；Key Laboratory of Silicate Cultural Relics Conservation (Shanghai University), Ministry of Education（上海大学硅酸盐文物保护重点实验室（教育部））
AGVBench: A Reliability-Oriented Benchmark of Data Augmentation for Vein Recognition
Chongqing Technology and Business University（重庆理工大学）；School of Engineering, Westlake University（西湖大学工程学院）；SAMOVAR, Telecom SudParis, Institute Polytechnique de Paris（SAMOVAR，Telecom SudParis，巴黎高等理工学院）；Guangzhou College of Applied Science and Technology（广州应用科学与技术学院）
Graduate School of System Informatics, Kobe University（神户大学系统信息学研究生院）
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable results in image processing tasks. However, their high expression ability risks overfitting. Consequently, data augmentation techniques have been proposed to prevent overfitting while enriching datasets. Recent CNN architectures with more parameters are rendering traditional data augmentation techniques insufficient. In this study, we propose a new data augmentation technique called random image cropping and patching (RICAP) which randomly crops four images and patches them to create a new training image. Moreover, RICAP mixes …
RareSpot: Spotting Small and Rare Wildlife in Aerial Imagery with Multi-Scale Consistency and Context-Aware Augmentation
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣芭芭拉分校）；Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute（史密森尼国家动物园与保护生物学研究所）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Key Laboratory of Pervasive Computing, Ministry of Education（教育部普适计算重点实验室）；Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, School of Clinical Medicine, Tsinghua University（清华大学临床医学院北京清华长庚医院）；Peking Union Medical College Hospital（北京协和医院）
Segmentation is considered to be a very crucial task in medical image analysis. This task has been easier since deep learning models have taken over with its high performing behavior. However, deep learning models dependency on large data proves it to be an obstacle in medical image analysis because of insufficient data samples. Several data augmentation techniques have been used to mitigate this problem. We propose a new augmentation method by introducing adversarial learning attack techniques, specifically Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM). Furthermore, We have also introduced the concept of …
It is counter-intuitive that multi-modality methods based on point cloud and images perform only marginally better or sometimes worse than approaches that solely use point cloud. This paper investigates the reason behind this phenomenon. Due to the fact that multi-modality data augmentation must maintain consistency between point cloud and images, recent methods in this field typically use relatively insufficient data augmentation. This shortage makes their performance under expectation. Therefore, we contribute a pipeline, named transformation flow, to bridge the gap between single and multi-…
University of Missouri（密苏里大学）；Sony Electronics Inc（索尼电子公司）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have demon- strated its successful applications in computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. For object recog- nition, CNNs might be limited by its strict label requirement and an implicit assumption that images are supposed to be target- object-dominated for optimal solutions. However, the labeling procedure, necessitating laying out the locations of target ob- jects, is very tedious, making high-quality large-scale dataset prohibitively expensive. Data augmentation schemes are widely used when deep networks suffer the insufficie…
MetAug: Contrastive Learning via Meta Feature Augmentation
Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou)（南方海洋科学与工程广东省实验室（广州））；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）
The problem of adapting models from a source domain using data from any target domain of interest has gained prominence, thanks to the brittle generalization in deep neural networks. While several test-time adaptation techniques have emerged, they typically rely on synthetic data augmentations in cases of limited target data availability. In this paper, we consider the challenging setting of single-shot adaptation and explore the design of augmentation strategies. We argue that augmentations utilized by existing methods are insufficient to handle large distribution shifts, and hence propose a …
Despite substantial progress in no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), previous training models often suffer from over-fitting due to the limited scale of used datasets, resulting in model performance bottlenecks. To tackle this challenge, we explore the potential of leveraging data augmentation to improve data efficiency and enhance model robustness. However, most existing data augmentation methods incur a serious issue, namely that it alters the image quality and leads to training images mismatching with their original labels. Additionally, although only a few data augmentation meth…
Exploring Inconsistent Knowledge Distillation for Object Detection with Data Augmentation
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）；State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所信息安全国家重点实验室）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学网络空间科学与技术学院）
Leveraging Foundation Model Automatic Data Augmentation Strategies and Skeletal Points for Hands Action Recognition in Industrial Assembly Lines
Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学机器人科学与工程学院）；Foshan Graduate School, Northeastern University（东北大学佛山研究生院）；College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学信息科学与工程学院）；The State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries, Northeastern University（东北大学流程工业综合自动化国家重点实验室）
While the fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) problems have been greatly developed in the past years, the Ultra-fine-grained visual categorization (Ultra-FGVC) problems have been understudied. FGVC aims at classifying objects from the same species (very similar categories), while the Ultra-FGVC targets at more challenging problems of classifying images at an ultra-fine granularity where even human experts may fail to identify the visual difference. The challenges for Ultra-FGVC mainly comes from two aspects: one is that the Ultra-FGVC often arises overfitting problems due to the lack of …
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学机械工程学院）
It has been challenging to identify ferrograph images with a small dataset and various scales of wear particle. A novel model is proposed in this study to cope with these challenging problems. For the problem of insufficient samples, we first proposed a data augmentation algorithm based on the permutation of image patches. Then, an auxiliary loss function of image patch permutation recognition was proposed to identify the image generated by the data augmentation algorithm. Moreover, we designed a feature extraction loss function to force the proposed model to extract more abundant features and…
School of Electronics and Computer Science（电子与计算机科学学院）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）
Object Detection has been a significant topic in computer vision. As the continuous development of Deep Learning, many advanced academic and industrial outcomes are established on localising and classifying the target objects, such as instance segmentation, video tracking and robotic vision. As the core concept of Deep Learning, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and associated training are highly integrated with task-driven modelling, having great effects on accurate detection. The main focus of improving detection performance is proposing DNNs with extra layers and novel topological connections to …
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bhopal（博帕尔印度信息技术学院）；Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal（博帕尔毛拉纳·阿扎德国立理工学院）
Deep learning is currently the most important branch of machine learning, with applications in speech recognition, computer vision, image classification, and medical imaging analysis. Plant recognition is one of the areas where image classification can be used to identify plant species through their leaves. Botanists devote a significant amount of time to recognizing plant species by personally inspecting. This paper describes a method for dissecting color images of Swedish leaves and identifying plant species. To achieve higher accuracy, the task is completed using transfer learning with the …
Nanjing University（南京大学）；National Institute of Healthcare Data Science, Nanjing University（南京大学医疗健康数据科学国家研究院）；Southeast University（东南大学）；Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd.（上海联影智能科技有限公司）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Korea University（高丽大学）；Central South University（中南大学）；The Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University（中南大学湘雅二医院）；Hangzhou First People’s Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine（浙江大学医学院附属杭州市第一人民医院）
How to fast and accurately assess the severity level of COVID-19 is an essential problem, when millions of people are suffering from the pandemic around the world. Currently, the chest CT is regarded as a popular and informative imaging tool for COVID-19 diagnosis. However, we observe that there are two issues -- weak annotation and insufficient data that may obstruct automatic COVID-19 severity assessment with CT images. To address these challenges, we propose a novel three-component method, i.e., 1) a deep multiple instance learning component with instance-level attention to jointly classify…
King AbdulAziz University（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹大学）；IISRI, Deakin University（迪肯大学IISRI）；Smartify Pty Ltd（Smartify私人有限公司）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
This study aims to explore different pre-trained models offered in the Torchvision package which is available in the PyTorch library. And investigate their effectiveness on fine-grained images classification. Transfer Learning is an effective method of achieving extremely good performance with insufficient training data. In many real-world situations, people cannot collect sufficient data required to train a deep neural network model efficiently. Transfer Learning models are pre-trained on a large data set, and can bring a good performance on smaller datasets with significantly lower training …
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
The development of unsupervised hashing is advanced by the recent popular contrastive learning paradigm. However, previous contrastive learning-based works have been hampered by (1) insufficient data similarity mining based on global-only image representations, and (2) the hash code semantic loss caused by the data augmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel method, namely Weighted Contrative Hashing (WCH), to take a step towards solving these two problems. We introduce a novel mutual attention module to alleviate the problem of information asymmetry in network features caused by the missi…
Multimodal Foundation Models for Zero-shot Animal Species Recognition in Camera Trap Images
Microsoft AI for Good Lab, Redmond（微软人工智能公益实验室）；University of Southern California, Los Angeles（南加州大学）；Microsoft Research, Redmond（微软研究院）；Nanyang Technological University, Singapore（南洋理工大学）；Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia（洛斯安第斯大学）
Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Materials Genome Engineering（北京材料基因工程高精尖创新中心）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；School of Computer and Communication Engineering（计算机与通信工程学院）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Knowledge Engineering for Materials Science（北京材料科学知识工程重点实验室）；Institute for Advanced Materials and Technology（先进材料与技术研究院）；School of Materials Science and Engineering（材料科学与工程学院）；School of Materials Science and Technology（材料科学与技术学院）；Liaoning Technical University（辽宁工程技术大学）；The Institute of Statistical Mathematics（统计数理研究所）；Research Organization of Information and Systems（信息·系统研究机构）；National Intellectual Property Administration（国家知识产权局）；Arab Open University（阿拉伯开放大学）；College of Information Science and Engineering（信息科学与工程学院）；China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）；Corrosion and Protection Center（腐蚀与防护中心）
Recent progress in material data mining has been driven by high-capacity models trained on large datasets. However, collecting experimental data (real data) has been extremely costly since the amount of human effort and expertise required. Here, we develop a novel transfer learning strategy to address small or insufficient data problem. This strategy realizes the fusion of real and simulated data, and the augmentation of training data in data mining procedure. For a specific task of image segmentation, this strategy can generate synthetic images by fusing physical mechanism of simulated images…
