Data-free Knowledge Distillation for Fine-grained Visual Categorization
School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University（华东师范大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University（山东大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD) is a promising approach for addressing issues related to model compression, security privacy, and transmission restrictions. Although the existing methods exploiting DFKD have achieved inspiring achievements in coarse-grained classification, in practical applications involving fine-grained classification tasks that require more detailed distinctions between similar categories, sub-optimal results are obtained. To address this issue, we propose an approach called DFKD-FGVC that extends DFKD to fine-grained visual categorization~(FGVC) tasks. Our approach utilizes an adversarial distillation framework with attention generator, mixed high-order attention distillation, and semantic feature contrast learning. Specifically, we introduce a spatial-wise attention mechanism to the generator to synthesize fine-grained images with more details of discriminative parts. We also utilize the mixed high-order attention mechanism to capture complex interactions among parts and the subtle differences among discriminative features of the fine-grained categories, paying attention to both local features and semantic context relationships. Moreover, we leverage the teacher and student models of the distillation framework to contrast high-level semantic feature maps in the hyperspace, comparing variances of different categories. We evaluate our approach on three widely-used FGVC benchmarks (Aircraft, Cars196, and CUB200) and demonstrate its superior performance.
Fine-grained object categorization aims for distinguishing objects of subordinate categories that belong to the same entry-level object category. The task is challenging due to the facts that (1) training images with ground-truth labels are difficult to obtain, and (2) variations among different subordinate categories are subtle. It is well established that characterizing features of different subordinate categories are located on local parts of object instances. In fact, careful part annotations are available in many fine-grained categorization datasets. However, manually annotating object pa…
This paper introduces a novel dataset FeatherV1, containing 28,272 images of feathers categorized by 595 bird species. It was created to perform taxonomic identification of bird species by a single feather, which can be applied in amateur and professional ornithology. FeatherV1 is the first publicly available bird's plumage dataset for machine learning, and it can raise interest for a new task in fine-grained visual recognition domain. The latest version of the dataset can be downloaded at https://github.com/feathers-dataset/feathersv1-dataset. We also present feathers classification task resu…
Existing fine-grained visual categorization methods often suffer from three challenges: lack of training data, large number of fine-grained categories, and high intraclass vs. low inter-class variance. In this work we propose a generic iterative framework for fine-grained categorization and dataset bootstrapping that handles these three challenges. Using deep metric learning with humans in the loop, we learn a low dimensional feature embedding with anchor points on manifolds for each category. These anchor points capture intra-class variances and remain discriminative between classes. In each …
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Makerere University（马凯雷雷大学）；National Crops Resources Research Institute（国家作物资源研究所）
Viral diseases are major sources of poor yields for cassava, the 2nd largest provider of carbohydrates in Africa.At least 80% of small-holder farmer households in Sub-Saharan Africa grow cassava. Since many of these farmers have smart phones, they can easily obtain photos of dis-eased and healthy cassava leaves in their farms, allowing the opportunity to use computer vision techniques to monitor the disease type and severity and increase yields. How-ever, annotating these images is extremely difficult as ex-perts who are able to distinguish between highly similar dis-eases need to be employed.…
Malong Technologies（码隆科技）；Shenzhen Malong Artificial Intelligence Research Center（深圳码隆人工智能研究中心）
Fine-grained image categorization is challenging due to the subtle inter-class differences.We posit that exploiting the rich relationships between channels can help capture such differences since different channels correspond to different semantics. In this paper, we propose a channel interaction network (CIN), which models the channel-wise interplay both within an image and across images. For a single image, a self-channel interaction (SCI) module is proposed to explore channel-wise correlation within the image. This allows the model to learn the complementary features from the correlated cha…
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 …
Fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) is challenging due in part to the fact that it is often difficult to acquire an enough number of training samples. To employ large models for FGVC without suffering from overfitting, existing methods usually adopt a strategy of pre-training the models using a rich set of auxiliary data, followed by fine-tuning on the target FGVC task. However, the objective of pre-training does not take the target task into account, and consequently such obtained models are suboptimal for fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a new deep FGVC mode…
Fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC), which aims at classifying objects with small inter-class variances, has been significantly advanced in recent years. However, ultra-fine-grained visual categorization (ultra-FGVC), which targets at identifying subclasses with extremely similar patterns, has not received much attention. In ultra-FGVC datasets, the samples per category are always scarce as the granularity moves down, which will lead to overfitting problems. Moreover, the difference among different categories is too subtle to distinguish even for professional experts. Motivated by these …
Cross-Level Multi-Instance Distillation for Self-Supervised Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Monash University（墨尔本大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能学院）；National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software（多媒体软件国家工程研究中心）；School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；State Key Lab. LIESMARS（国家重点实验室）
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）；JD Digits（京东数科）；University at Albany, State University of New York（纽约州立大学奥尔巴尼分校）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Tencent Youtu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）
Fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) is an important but challenging task due to high intra-class variances and low inter-class variances caused by deformation, occlusion, illumination, etc. An attention convolutional binary neural tree architecture is presented to address those problems for weakly supervised FGVC. Specifically, we incorporate convolutional operations along edges of the tree structure, and use the routing functions in each node to determine the root-to-leaf computational paths within the tree. The final decision is computed as the summation of the predictions from leaf no…
Car-1000: A New Large Scale Fine-Grained Visual Categorization Dataset
Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications (Southeast University), Ministry of Education（新一代人工智能技术及交叉应用国家重点实验室（东南大学））；School of Astronautics, Beihang University（北航航天学院）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Google（谷歌）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
We present a new benchmark dataset, Sapsucker Woods 60 (SSW60), for advancing research on audiovisual fine-grained categorization. While our community has made great strides in fine-grained visual categorization on images, the counterparts in audio and video fine-grained categorization are relatively unexplored. To encourage advancements in this space, we have carefully constructed the SSW60 dataset to enable researchers to experiment with classifying the same set of categories in three different modalities: images, audio, and video. The dataset covers 60 species of birds and is comprised of i…
Concept Drift and Long-Tailed Distribution in Fine-Grained Visual Categorization: Benchmark and Method
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学电子信息与通信学院）；Alibaba Group, DEEPROUTE.AI（阿里巴巴集团DEEPROUTE.AI）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Linkoping University（林雪平大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Camera-based electronic monitoring (EM) systems are increasingly being deployed onboard commercial fishing vessels to collect essential data for fisheries management and regulation. These systems generate large quantities of video data which must be reviewed on land by human experts. Computer vision can assist this process by automatically detecting and classifying fish species, however the lack of existing public data in this domain has hindered progress. To address this, we present the Fishnet Open Images Database, a large dataset of EM imagery for fish detection and fine-grained categorizat…
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；UBTECH Sydney AI Centre（优必选悉尼人工智能中心）；Australian Centre for Field Robotics（澳大利亚现场机器人研究中心）
Data augmentation has been proved effective in training deep models. Existing data augmentation methods tackle the fine-grained problem by blending image pairs and fusing corresponding labels according to the statistics of mixed pixels, which produces additional noise harmful to the performance of networks. Motivated by this, we present a simple yet effective cross ensemble knowledge distillation (CEKD) model for fine-grained feature learning. We innovatively propose a cross distillation module to provide additional supervision to alleviate the noise problem, and propose a collaborative ensemb…
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Vistel AI Lab, Visionary Intelligence Ltd.（Vistel AI实验室，睿视智联科技有限公司）
Expanding visual categorization into a novel domain without the need of extra annotation has been a long-term interest for multimedia intelligence. Previously, this challenge has been approached by unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Given labeled data from a source domain and unlabeled data from a target domain, UDA seeks for a deep representation that is both discriminative and domain-invariant. While UDA focuses on the target domain, we argue that the performance on both source and target domains matters, as in practice which domain a test example comes from is unknown. In this paper we e…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）；Peking University（北京大学）
In the past few years, transformers have achieved promising performances on various computer vision tasks. Unfortunately, the immense inference overhead of most existing vision transformers withholds their from being deployed on edge devices such as cell phones and smart watches. Knowledge distillation is a widely used paradigm for compressing cumbersome architectures via transferring information to a compact student. However, most of them are designed for convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which do not fully investigate the character of vision transformer (ViT). In this paper, we utilize t…
Robust Saliency-Aware Distillation for Few-shot Fine-grained Visual Recognition
School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Brain and Affective Cognitive Research Center, Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室脑与情感认知研究中心）；Engineering Research Center of the Ministry of Education on Health Intelligent Perception and Paralleled Digital-Human（教育部健康智能感知与平行数字人工程研究中心）
FD$^2$: A Dedicated Framework for Fine-Grained Dataset Distillation
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Hokkaido University（北海道大学）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)（三菱电机研究实验室（MERL））
Pothole classification has become an important task for road inspection vehicles to save drivers from potential car accidents and repair bills. Given the limited computational power and fixed number of training epochs, we propose iterative self knowledge distillation (ISKD) to train lightweight pothole classifiers. Designed to improve both the teacher and student models over time in knowledge distillation, ISKD outperforms the state-of-the-art self knowledge distillation method on three pothole classification datasets across four lightweight network architectures, which supports that self know…
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee（鲁尔基印度理工学院）；Ghent University（根特大学）
We address the problem of scene classification from optical remote sensing (RS) images based on the paradigm of hierarchical metric learning. Ideally, supervised metric learning strategies learn a projection from a set of training data points so as to minimize intra-class variance while maximizing inter-class separability to the class label space. However, standard metric learning techniques do not incorporate the class interaction information in learning the transformation matrix, which is often considered to be a bottleneck while dealing with fine-grained visual categories. As a remedy, we p…
DeCO: Discriminative Evidence Composition for Fine-Grained Dataset Distillation
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hokkaido University（北海道大学）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
A Multihead Continual Learning Framework for Fine-Grained Fashion Image Retrieval with Contrastive Learning and Exponential Moving Average Distillation
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University（信息科学与技术研究生院，北海道大学）；Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（信息科学与技术研究生院，东京大学）
SRI International（SRI国际）；Google（谷歌）；Cornell Tech（康奈尔科技学院）
Food classification is a challenging problem due to the large number of categories, high visual similarity between different foods, as well as the lack of datasets for training state-of-the-art deep models. Solving this problem will require advances in both computer vision models as well as datasets for evaluating these models. In this paper we focus on the second aspect and introduce FoodX-251, a dataset of 251 fine-grained food categories with 158k images collected from the web. We use 118k images as a training set and provide human verified labels for 40k images that can be used for validat…
BAS-OPD: Budget-Aware Selective On-Policy Self-Distillation for Fine-Grained Multimodal Perception
HFIPS, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院合肥物质科学研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
In this paper, we tackle the problem of visual categorization of dog breeds, which is a surprisingly challenging task due to simultaneously present low interclass distances and high intra-class variances. Our approach combines several techniques well known in our community but often not utilized for fine-grained recognition: (1) automatic segmentation, (2) efficient part detection, and (3) combination of multiple features. In particular, we demonstrate that a simple head detector embedded in an off-the-shelf recognition pipeline can improve recognition accuracy quite significantly, highlightin…
University of Otago（奥塔哥大学）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
We present an end-to-end deep network for fine-grained visual categorization called Collaborative Convolutional Network (CoCoNet). The network uses a collaborative layer after the convolutional layers to represent an image as an optimal weighted collaboration of features learned from training samples as a whole rather than one at a time. This gives CoCoNet more power to encode the fine-grained nature of the data with limited samples. We perform a detailed study of the performance with 1-stage and 2-stage transfer learning. The ablation study shows that the proposed method outperforms its const…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Shanghai University（上海大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
The challenges of high intra-class variance yet low inter-class fluctuations in fine-grained visual categorization are more severe with few labeled samples, \textit{i.e.,} Fine-Grained categorization problems under the Few-Shot setting (FGFS). High-order features are usually developed to uncover subtle differences between sub-categories in FGFS, but they are less effective in handling the high intra-class variance. In this paper, we propose a Target-Oriented Alignment Network (TOAN) to investigate the fine-grained relation between the target query image and support classes. The feature of each…
Advanced Digital Sciences Center（高级数字科学中心）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
In this paper, we categorize fine-grained images without using any object / part annotation neither in the training nor in the testing stage, a step towards making it suitable for deployments. Fine-grained image categorization aims to classify objects with subtle distinctions. Most existing works heavily rely on object / part detectors to build the correspondence between object parts by using object or object part annotations inside training images. The need for expensive object annotations prevents the wide usage of these methods. Instead, we propose to select useful parts from multi-scale pa…
University of Massachusetts, Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
Model compression and knowledge distillation have been successfully applied for cross-architecture and cross-domain transfer learning. However, a key requirement is that training examples are in correspondence across the domains. We show that in many scenarios of practical importance such aligned data can be synthetically generated using computer graphics pipelines allowing domain adaptation through distillation. We apply this technique to learn models for recognizing low-resolution images using labeled high-resolution images, non-localized objects using labeled localized objects, line-drawing…
We present a simple deep learning framework to simultaneously predict keypoint locations and their respective visibilities and use those to achieve state-of-the-art performance for fine-grained classification. We show that by conditioning the predictions on object proposals with sufficient image support, our method can do well without complicated spatial reasoning. Instead, inference methods with robustness to outliers, yield state-of-the-art for keypoint localization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our accurate keypoint localization and visibility prediction on the fine-grained bird reco…
Local Dense Logit Relations for Enhanced Knowledge Distillation
Northeastern University, China（东北大学）；South China Normal University, China（华南师范大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, CAS, China（深圳先进技术研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China（香港中文大学）
University of Technology, Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
In the context of fine-grained visual categorization, the ability to interpret models as human-understandable visual manuals is sometimes as important as achieving high classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel Part-Stacked CNN architecture that explicitly explains the fine-grained recognition process by modeling subtle differences from object parts. Based on manually-labeled strong part annotations, the proposed architecture consists of a fully convolutional network to locate multiple object parts and a two-stream classification network that en- codes object-level and part-le…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Fine-grained categorization can benefit from part-based features which reveal subtle visual differences between object categories. Handcrafted features have been widely used for part detection and classification. Although a recent trend seeks to learn such features automatically using powerful deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), their training and possibly also testing require manually provided annotations which are costly to obtain. To relax these requirements, we assume in this study a general problem setting in which the raw images are only provided with object…
Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in the online knowledge distillation. Adopting an one-stage and end-to-end training fashion, online knowledge distillation uses aggregated intermediated predictions of multiple peer models for training. However, the absence of a powerful teacher model may result in the homogeneity problem between group peers, affecting the effectiveness of group distillation adversely. In this paper, we propose a novel online knowledge distillation method, \textbf{C}hannel \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{S}upervision for Online Knowledge Distillation (CSS), which st…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Vision Semantics Ltd（视觉语义有限公司）
Knowledge distillation is an effective approach to transferring knowledge from a teacher neural network to a student target network for satisfying the low-memory and fast running requirements in practice use. Whilst being able to create stronger target networks compared to the vanilla non-teacher based learning strategy, this scheme needs to train additionally a large teacher model with expensive computational cost. In this work, we present a Self-Referenced Deep Learning (SRDL) strategy. Unlike both vanilla optimisation and existing knowledge distillation, SRDL distils the knowledge discovere…
Fine-grained categories are more difficulty distinguished than generic categories due to the similarity of inter-class and the diversity of intra-class. Therefore, the fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) is considered as one of challenge problems in computer vision recently. A new feature learning framework, which is based on a two-layer local constrained sparse coding architecture, is proposed in this paper. The two-layer architecture is introduced for learning intermediate-level features, and the local constrained term is applied to guarantee the local smooth of coding coefficients. Fo…
Decoupled Hierarchical Distillation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition
School of Computer Science and Engineering, and the Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications, Southeast University（计算机科学与工程学院，新一代人工智能技术及跨学科应用重点实验室，东南大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（计算机科学与工程学院，南京理工大学）；Institute of Intelligent Information Processing, Taizhou University（智能信息处理研究院，台州大学）；School of Engineering Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（工程科学学院，中国科学院大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（计算机科学与工程学院，南洋理工大学）
Knowledge Distillation is a technique which aims to utilize dark knowledge to compress and transfer information from a vast, well-trained neural network (teacher model) to a smaller, less capable neural network (student model) with improved inference efficiency. This approach of distilling knowledge has gained popularity as a result of the prohibitively complicated nature of such cumbersome models for deployment on edge computing devices. Generally, the teacher models used to teach smaller student models are cumbersome in nature and expensive to train. To eliminate the necessity for a cumberso…
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University（浙江大学医学院附属第二医院）；Waseda University（早稻田大学）；Communication University of Zhejiang（浙江传媒学院）
Precise and rapid categorization of images in the B-scan ultrasound modality is vital for diagnosing ocular diseases. Nevertheless, distinguishing various diseases in ultrasound still challenges experienced ophthalmologists. Thus a novel contrastive disentangled network (CDNet) is developed in this work, aiming to tackle the fine-grained image categorization (FGIC) challenges of ocular abnormalities in ultrasound images, including intraocular tumor (IOT), retinal detachment (RD), posterior scleral staphyloma (PSS), and vitreous hemorrhage (VH). Three essential components of CDNet are the weakl…
Deep learning models have demonstrated remarkable success in object detection, yet their complexity and computational intensity pose a barrier to deploying them in real-world applications (e.g., self-driving perception). Knowledge Distillation (KD) is an effective way to derive efficient models. However, only a small number of KD methods tackle object detection. Also, most of them focus on mimicking the plain features of the teacher model but rarely consider how the features contribute to the final detection. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for knowledge distillation in object detec…
Updated on 24/09/2015: This update provides preliminary experiment results for fine-grained classification on the surveillance data of CompCars. The train/test splits are provided in the updated dataset. See details in Section 6.
