Rotation augmentations generally improve a model's invariance/equivariance to rotation - except in object detection. In object detection the shape is not known, therefore rotation creates a label ambiguity. We show that the de-facto method for bounding box label rotation, the Largest Box Method, creates very large labels, leading to poor performance and in many cases worse performance than using no rotation at all. We propose a new method of rotation augmentation that can be implemented in a few lines of code. First, we create a differentiable approximation of label accuracy and show that axis-aligning the bounding box around an ellipse is optimal. We then introduce Rotation Uncertainty (RU) Loss, allowing the model to adapt to the uncertainty of the labels. On five different datasets (including COCO, PascalVOC, and Transparent Object Bin Picking), this approach improves the rotational invariance of both one-stage and two-stage architectures when measured with AP, AP50, and AP75. The code is available at https://github.com/akasha-imaging/ICCV2021.
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) perform very well in image classification and object detection in recent years, but even the most advanced models have limited rotation invariance. Known solutions include the enhancement of training data and the increase of rotation invariance by globally merging the rotation equivariant features. These methods either increase the workload of training or increase the number of model parameters. To address this problem, this paper proposes a module that can be inserted into the existing networks, and directly incorporates the rotation invariance into the fe…
Recent attempts at introducing rotation invariance or equivariance in 3D deep learning approaches have shown promising results, but these methods still struggle to reach the performances of standard 3D neural networks. In this work we study the relation between equivariance and invariance in 3D point convolutions. We show that using rotation-equivariant alignments, it is possible to make any convolutional layer rotation-invariant. Furthermore, we improve this simple alignment procedure by using the alignment themselves as features in the convolution, and by combining multiple alignments togeth…
Efficient Rotation Invariance in Deep Neural Networks through Artificial Mental Rotation
ZHAW Centre for Artificial Intelligence（苏黎世应用科学大学人工智能中心）；University of Lugano（卢加诺大学）；European Centre for Living Technology（欧洲生命技术中心）；The Swiss AI Lab IDSIA（瑞士人工智能实验室 IDSIA）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
Convolutional neural networks have shown great success on feature extraction from raw input data such as images. Although convolutional neural networks are invariant to translations on the inputs, they are not invariant to other transformations, including rotation and flip. Recent attempts have been made to incorporate more invariance in image recognition applications, but they are not applicable to dense prediction tasks, such as image segmentation. In this paper, we propose a set of methods based on kernel rotation and flip to enable rotation and flip invariance in convolutional neural netwo…
Typically, a salient object detection (SOD) model faces opposite requirements in processing object interiors and boundaries. The features of interiors should be invariant to strong appearance change so as to pop-out the salient object as a whole, while the features of boundaries should be selective to slight appearance change to distinguish salient objects and background. To address this selectivity-invariance dilemma, we propose a novel boundary-aware network with successive dilation for image-based SOD. In this network, the feature selectivity at boundaries is enhanced by incorporating a bou…
Accurately localising object proposals is an important precondition for high detection rate for the state-of-the-art object detection frameworks. The accuracy of an object detection method has been shown highly related to the average recall (AR) of the proposals. In this work, we propose an advanced object proposal network in favour of translation-invariance for objectness classification, translation-variance for bounding box regression, large effective receptive fields for capturing global context and scale-invariance for dealing with a range of object sizes from extremely small to large. The…
Rotation invariance and translation invariance have great values in image recognition tasks. In this paper, we bring a new architecture in convolutional neural network (CNN) named cyclic convolutional layer to achieve rotation invariance in 2-D symbol recognition. We can also get the position and orientation of the 2-D symbol by the network to achieve detection purpose for multiple non-overlap target. Last but not least, this architecture can achieve one-shot learning in some cases using those invariance.
School of Computer Science, University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）
Recent investigations on rotation invariance for 3D point clouds have been devoted to devising rotation-invariant feature descriptors or learning canonical spaces where objects are semantically aligned. Examinations of learning frameworks for invariance have seldom been looked into. In this work, we review rotation invariance in terms of point cloud registration and propose an effective framework for rotation invariance learning via three sequential stages, namely rotation-invariant shape encoding, aligned feature integration, and deep feature registration. We first encode shape descriptors co…
Multimodal image matching is an important prerequisite for multisource image information fusion. Compared with the traditional matching problem, multimodal feature matching is more challenging due to the severe nonlinear radiation distortion (NRD). Radiation-variation insensitive feature transform (RIFT)~\cite{li2019rift} has shown very good robustness to NRD and become a baseline method in multimodal feature matching. However, the high computational cost for rotation invariance largely limits its usage in practice. In this paper, we propose an improved RIFT method, called RIFT2. We develop a …
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Shanghai Aerospace Control Technology Institute（上海航天控制技术研究所）；Peking Union Medical College Hospital（北京协和医院）；Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College（中国医学科学院北京协和医学院）
The computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system can provide a reference basis for the clinical diagnosis of skin diseases. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can not only extract visual elements such as colors and shapes but also semantic features. As such they have made great improvements in many tasks of dermoscopy images. The imaging of dermoscopy has no principal orientation, indicating that there are a large number of skin lesion rotations in the datasets. However, CNNs lack rotation invariance, which is bound to affect the robustness of CNNs against rotations. To tackle this issue, we propos…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Pixtalks Tech（Pixtalks科技）
In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to endow deep 3D models with rotation invariance by expressing the coordinates in an intrinsic frame determined by the object shape itself. Key to our approach is to find such an intrinsic frame which should be unique to the identical object shape and consistent across different instances of the same category, e.g. the frame axes of desks should be all roughly along the edges. Interestingly, the principal component analysis exactly provides an effective way to define such a frame, i.e. setting the principal components as the frame axes. A…
Revisiting Data Augmentation for Rotational Invariance in Convolutional Neural Networks
Instituto de Investigación en Informática LIDI, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Nacional de La Plata（拉普拉塔国立大学信息学院LIDI信息学研究所）；Universitat Rovira i Virgili（罗维拉-依维尔基里大学）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Performance of neural networks can be significantly improved by encoding known invariance for particular tasks. Many image classification tasks, such as those related to cellular imaging, exhibit invariance to rotation. We present a novel scheme using the magnitude response of the 2D-discrete-Fourier transform (2D-DFT) to encode rotational invariance in neural networks, along with a new, efficient convolutional scheme for encoding rotational equivariance throughout convolutional layers. We implemented this scheme for several image classification tasks and demonstrated improved performance, in …
VNI-Net: Vector Neurons-based Rotation-Invariant Descriptor for LiDAR Place Recognition
Department of Computer Science and Technology, School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学电子信息工程学院计算机科学与技术系）；MOE Key Lab of Embedded System and Service Computing, Tongji University（同济大学嵌入式系统与服务计算教育部重点实验室）；Institute of Intelligent Vehicles, Tongji University（同济大学智能汽车研究所）
University Hospital and University of Zurich（苏黎世大学医院及苏黎世大学）
Automated detection of mitotic figures in histopathology images is a challenging task: here, we present the different steps that describe the strategy we applied to participate in the MIDOG 2021 competition. The purpose of the competition was to evaluate the generalization of solutions to images acquired with unseen target scanners (hidden for the participants) under the constraint of using training data from a limited set of four independent source scanners. Given this goal and constraints, we joined the challenge by proposing a straight-forward solution based on a combination of state-of-the…
PRIAn Research Unit（PRIAn研究单元）；School of Engineering（工程学院）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Learning invariant representations is a critical task in computer vision. In this paper, we propose the Theta-Restricted Boltzmann Machine (θ-RBM in short), which builds upon the original RBM formulation and injects the notion of rotation-invariance during the learning procedure. In contrast to previous approaches, we do not transform the training set with all possible rotations. Instead, we rotate the gradient filters when they are computed during the Contrastive Divergence algorithm. We formulate our model as an unfactored gated Boltzmann machine, where another input layer is used to modulat…
We present a novel rotation invariant architecture operating directly on point cloud data. We demonstrate how rotation invariance can be injected into a recently proposed point-based PCNN architecture, at all layers of the network, achieving invariance to both global shape transformations, and to local rotations on the level of patches or parts, useful when dealing with non-rigid objects. We achieve this by employing a spherical harmonics based kernel at different layers of the network, which is guaranteed to be invariant to rigid motions. We also introduce a more efficient pooling operation f…
Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis (CMVS), University of Oulu（奥卢大学机器视觉与信号分析中心（CMVS））
In recent years, convolutional neural network has shown good performance in many image processing and computer vision tasks. However, a standard CNN model is not invariant to image rotations. In fact, even slight rotation of an input image will seriously degrade its performance. This shortcoming precludes the use of CNN in some practical scenarios. Thus, in this paper, we focus on designing convolutional layer with good rotation invariance. Specifically, based on a simple rotation-invariant coordinate system, we propose a new convolutional operation, called Rotation-Invariant Coordinate Convol…
Swansea University（斯旺西大学）；Université de Toulon（土伦大学）；Aix Marseille Univ（艾克斯-马赛大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）
Robustness to transformation is desirable in many computer vision tasks, given that input data often exhibits pose variance. While translation invariance and equivariance is a documented phenomenon of CNNs, sensitivity to other transformations is typically encouraged through data augmentation. We investigate the modulation of complex valued convolutional weights with learned Gabor filters to enable orientation robustness. The resulting network can generate orientation dependent features free of interpolation with a single set of learnable rotation-governing parameters. By choosing to either re…
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence（奥地利人工智能研究院）；Johannes Kepler University（约翰内斯·开普勒大学）
Content-invariance in mapping codes learned by GAEs is a useful feature for various relation learning tasks. In this paper we show that the content-invariance of mapping codes for images of 2D and 3D rotated objects can be substantially improved by extending the standard GAE loss (symmetric reconstruction error) with a regularization term that penalizes the symmetric cross-reconstruction error. This error term involves reconstruction of pairs with mapping codes obtained from other pairs exhibiting similar transformations. Although this would principally require knowledge of the transformations…
Local-consistent Transformation Learning for Rotation-invariant Point Cloud Analysis
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）
Rotation invariance has been studied in the computer vision community primarily in the context of small in-plane rotations. This is usually achieved by building invariant image features. However, the problem of achieving invariance for large rotation angles remains largely unexplored. In this work, we tackle this problem by directly compensating for large rotations, as opposed to building invariant features. This is inspired by the neuro-scientific concept of mental rotation, which humans use to compare pairs of rotated objects. Our contributions here are three-fold. First, we train a Convolut…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Recent progresses in 3D deep learning has shown that it is possible to design special convolution operators to consume point cloud data. However, a typical drawback is that rotation invariance is often not guaranteed, resulting in networks being trained with data augmented with rotations. In this paper, we introduce a novel convolution operator for point clouds that achieves rotation invariance. Our core idea is to use low-level rotation invariant geometric features such as distances and angles to design a convolution operator for point cloud learning. The well-known point ordering problem is …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on many visual recognition tasks. However, the combination of convolution and pooling operations only shows invariance to small local location changes in meaningful objects in input. Sometimes, such networks are trained using data augmentation to encode this invariance into the parameters, which restricts the capacity of the model to learn the content of these objects. A more efficient use of the parameter budget is to encode rotation or translation invariance into the model architecture, which relieves the mod…
Chennai Mathematical Institute（金奈数学研究所）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Convolutional neural networks or standard CNNs (StdCNNs) are translation-equivariant models that achieve translation invariance when trained on data augmented with sufficient translations. Recent work on equivariant models for a given group of transformations (e.g., rotations) has lead to group-equivariant convolutional neural networks (GCNNs). GCNNs trained on data augmented with sufficient rotations achieve rotation invariance. Recent work by authors arXiv:2002.11318 studies a trade-off between invariance and robustness to adversarial attacks. In another related work arXiv:2005.08632, given …
University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO)（瑞士西部应用科学大学）；Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences（哈佛大学工程与应用科学学院）；Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV)（沃州大学中心医院）；Hopitaux Universitaires de Genève (HUG)（日内瓦大学医院）
Locally Rotation Invariant (LRI) image analysis was shown to be fundamental in many applications and in particular in medical imaging where local structures of tissues occur at arbitrary rotations. LRI constituted the cornerstone of several breakthroughs in texture analysis, including Local Binary Patterns (LBP), Maximum Response 8 (MR8) and steerable filterbanks. Whereas globally rotation invariant Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) were recently proposed, LRI was very little investigated in the context of deep learning. LRI designs allow learning filters accounting for all orientations, whi…
Recent years have witnessed the emergence and increasing popularity of 3D medical imaging techniques with the development of 3D sensors and technology. However, achieving geometric invariance in the processing of 3D medical images is computationally expensive but nonetheless essential due to the presence of possible errors caused by rigid registration techniques. An alternative way to analyze medical imaging is by understanding the 3D shapes represented in terms of point-cloud. Though in the medical imaging community, 3D point-cloud processing is not a "go-to" choice, it is a canonical way to …
Humans can identify objects following various spatial transformations such as scale and viewpoint. This extends to novel objects, after a single presentation at a single pose, sometimes referred to as online invariance. CNNs have been proposed as a compelling model of human vision, but their ability to identify objects across transformations is typically tested on held-out samples of trained categories after extensive data augmentation. This paper assesses whether standard CNNs can support human-like online invariance by training models to recognize images of synthetic 3D objects that undergo …
Rotation invariance has been an important topic in computer vision tasks. Ideally, robot grasp detection should be rotation-invariant. However, rotation-invariance in robotic grasp detection has been only recently studied by using rotation anchor box that are often time-consuming and unreliable for multiple objects. In this paper, we propose a rotation ensemble module (REM) for robotic grasp detection using convolutions that rotates network weights. Our proposed REM was able to outperform current state-of-the-art methods by achieving up to 99.2% (image-wise), 98.6% (object-wise) accuracies on …
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory（约翰霍普金斯大学应用物理实验室）
Perturbation-based attacks, while not physically realizable, have been the main emphasis of adversarial machine learning (ML) research. Patch-based attacks by contrast are physically realizable, yet most work has focused on 2D domain with recent forays into 3D. Characterizing the robustness properties of patch attacks and their invariance to 3D pose is important, yet not fully elucidated, and is the focus of this paper. To this end, several contributions are made here: A) we develop a new metric called mean Attack Success over Transformations (mAST) to evaluate patch attack robustness and inva…
The human visual system is able to recognize objects despite transformations that can drastically alter their appearance. To this end, much effort has been devoted to the invariance properties of recognition systems. Invariance can be engineered (e.g. convolutional nets), or learned from data explicitly (e.g. temporal coherence) or implicitly (e.g. by data augmentation). One idea that has not, to date, been explored is the integration of latent variables which permit a search over a learned space of transformations. Motivated by evidence that people mentally simulate transformations in space w…
Convolutional networks are successful due to their equivariance/invariance under translations. However, rotatable data such as images, volumes, shapes, or point clouds require processing with equivariance/invariance under rotations in cases where the rotational orientation of the coordinate system does not affect the meaning of the data (e.g. object classification). On the other hand, estimation/processing of rotations is necessary in cases where rotations are important (e.g. motion estimation). There has been recent progress in methods and theory in all these regards. Here we provide an overv…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Previous work generally believes that improving the spatial invariance of convolutional networks is the key to object counting. However, after verifying several mainstream counting networks, we surprisingly found too strict pixel-level spatial invariance would cause overfit noise in the density map generation. In this paper, we try to use locally connected Gaussian kernels to replace the original convolution filter to estimate the spatial position in the density map. The purpose of this is to allow the feature extraction process to potentially stimulate the density map generation process to ov…
