Abstract One of the fundamental properties of a salient object region is its contrast with the immediate context. The problem is that numerous object regions exist which potentially can all be salient. One way to prevent an exhaustive search over all object regions is by using object proposal algorithms. These return a limited set of regions which are most likely to contain an object. Several saliency estimation methods have used object proposals. However, they focus on the saliency of the proposal only, and the importance of its immediate context has not been evaluated. In this paper, we aim to improve salient object detection. Therefore, we extend object proposal methods with context proposals, which allow to incorporate the immediate context in the saliency computation. We propose several saliency features which are computed from the context proposals. In the experiments, we evaluate five object proposal methods for the task of saliency segmentation, and find that Multiscale Combinatorial Grouping outperforms the others. Furthermore, experiments show that the proposed context features improve performance, and that our method matches results on the FT datasets and obtains competitive results on three other datasets (PASCAL-S, MSRA-B and ECSSD).
Deep convolutional neural networks have revolutionized computer vision over the last few years. This has recently led to several papers on deep learning for saliency detection . Both @cite_17 and @cite_2 consider parallel networks which evaluate the image at various scales. @cite_3 use two networks to describe local and global saliency. @cite_15 combine a local and global model to compute saliency. The main challenge for saliency detection with deep networks is the amount of training data which is not always available. This is solved in by training on the largest available saliency dataset, namely MSRA-B , and testing on the other datasets (both also use pretrained network weights trained on the 1M Imagenet dataset). Like these method, we will use a pretrained network for the extraction of features for saliency detection.
@cite_15 @cite_2 @cite_3 @cite_17
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Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become a key element in the recent breakthrough of salient object detection. However, existing CNN-based methods are based on either patchwise (regionwise) training and inference or fully convolutional networks. Methods in the former category are generally time-consuming due to severe storage and computational redundancies among overlapping patches. To overcome this deficiency, methods in the second category attempt to directly map a raw input image to a predicted dense saliency map in a single network forward pass. Though being very efficient, it is arduous for these methods to detect salient objects of different scales or salient regions with weak semantic information. In this paper, we develop hybrid contrast-oriented deep neural networks to overcome the aforementioned limitations. Each of our deep networks is composed of two complementary components, including a fully convolutional stream for dense prediction and a segment-level spatial pooling stream for sparse saliency inference. We further propose an attentional module that learns weight maps for fusing the two saliency predictions from these two streams. A tailored alternate scheme is designed to train these deep networks by fine-tuning pretrained baseline models. Finally, a customized fully connected conditional random field model incorporating a salient contour feature embedding can be optionally applied as a postprocessing step to improve spatial coherence and contour positioning in the fused result from these two streams. Extensive experiments on six benchmark data sets demonstrate that our proposed model can significantly outperform the state of the art in terms of all popular evaluation metrics. In recent years, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have broken all records in salient object detection. However, training such a deep model requires a large amount of manual annotations. Our goal is to overcome this limitation by automatically converting an existing deep contour detection model into a salient object detection model without using any manual salient object masks. For this purpose, we have created a deep network architecture, namely Contour-to-Saliency Network (C2S-Net), by grafting a new branch onto a well-trained contour detection network. Therefore, our C2S-Net has two branches for performing two different tasks: (1) predicting contours with the original contour branch, and (2) estimating per-pixel saliency score of each image with the newly-added saliency branch. To bridge the gap between these two tasks, we further propose a contour-to-saliency transferring method to automatically generate salient object masks which can be used to train the saliency branch from outputs of the contour branch. Finally, we introduce a novel alternating training pipeline to gradually update the network parameters. In this scheme, the contour branch generates saliency masks for training the saliency branch, while the saliency branch, in turn, feeds back saliency knowledge in the form of saliency-aware contour labels, for fine-tuning the contour branch. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on five well-known benchmarks, outperforming existing fully supervised methods while also maintaining high efficiency. The prediction of salient areas in images has been traditionally addressed with hand-crafted features based on neuroscience principles. This paper, however, addresses the problem with a completely data-driven approach by training a convolutional neural network (convnet). The learning process is formulated as a minimization of a loss function that measures the Euclidean distance of the predicted saliency map with the provided ground truth. The recent publication of large datasets of saliency prediction has provided enough data to train end-to-end architectures that are both fast and accurate. Two designs are proposed: a shallow convnet trained from scratch, and a another deeper solution whose first three layers are adapted from another network trained for classification. To the authors' knowledge, these are the first end-to-end CNNs trained and tested for the purpose of saliency prediction. The prediction of salient areas in images has been traditionally addressed with hand-crafted features based on neuroscience principles. This paper, however, addresses the problem with a completely data-driven approach by training a convolutional neural network (convnet). The learning process is formulated as a minimization of a loss function that measures the Euclidean distance of the predicted saliency map with the provided ground truth. The recent publication of large datasets of saliency prediction has provided enough data to train end-to-end architectures that are both fast and accurate. Two designs are proposed: a shallow convnet trained from scratch, and a another deeper solution whose first three layers are adapted from another network trained for classification. To the authors knowledge, these are the first end-to-end CNNs trained and tested for the purpose of saliency prediction. Feature matters. In this paper, a novel deep neural network framework integrated with low-level features for salient object detection is proposed for complex images. We utilise the advantage of convolutional neural networks to automatically learn the high-level features that capture the structured information and semantic context in the image. In order to better adapt a CNN model into the saliency task, we redesign the network architecture based on typical saliency datasets, which is relatively small-scale compared to ImageNet. Several low-level features are extracted, which can effectively capture contrast and spatial information in the salient regions, and incorporated to compensate with the learned high-level features at the output of the very last fully connected layer. The concatenated feature vector is further fed into a hinge-loss SVM detector in a joint discriminative learning manner and the final saliency score of each region within the bounding box is obtained by the linear combination of the detector's weights. Experiments on three challenging benchmarks demonstrate our algorithm to be effective and superior than most low-level oriented state-of-the-arts in terms of precision-recall curves, F-measure and mean absolute errors. Moreover, a series of ablation studies are conducted to verify our algorithm's simplicity and efficiency from different aspects. Propose a novel deep neural network framework embedded with low-level features (LCNN) for salient object detection in complex images.Utilise the advantage of convolutional neural networks to automatically learn the high-level features that capture the structured information and semantic context in the image.Experiments on three challenging benchmarks demonstrate our algorithm to be effective and superior than most low-level oriented state-of-the-arts in terms of precision-recall curves, F-measure and mean absolute errors. Recently, neuron activations extracted from a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) show promising performance in various visual tasks. However, due to the domain and task bias, using the features generated from the model pre-trained for image classification as image representations for instance retrieval is problematic. In this paper, we propose quartet-net learning to improve the discriminative power of CNN features for instance retrieval. The general idea is to map the features into a space where the image similarity can be better evaluated. Our network differs from the traditional Siamese-net in two ways. First, we adopt a double-margin contrastive loss with a dynamic margin tuning strategy to train the network which leads to more robust performance. Second, we introduce in the mimic learning regularization to improve the generalization ability of the network by preventing it from overfitting to the training data. Catering for the network learning, we collect a large-scale dataset, namely GeoPair, which consists of 68k matching image pairs and 63k non-matching pairs. Experiments on several standard instance retrieval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Deep convolutional neural networks have achieved impressive performance on a broad range of problems, beating prior art on established benchmarks, but it often remains unclear what are the representations learnt by those systems and how they achieve such performance. This article examines the specific problem of saliency detection, where benchmarks are currently dominated by CNN-based approaches, and investigates the properties of the learnt representation by visualizing the artificial neurons' receptive fields. We demonstrate that fine tuning a pre-trained network on the saliency detection task lead to a profound transformation of the network's deeper layers. Moreover we argue that this transformation leads to the emergence of receptive fields conceptually similar to the centre-surround filters hypothesized by early research on visual saliency. 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 component of the proposed CNN pipeline. The initial spatial and spectral feature maps obtained from the multi-scale filter bank are then combined together to form a joint spatio-spectral feature map. The joint feature map representing rich spectral and spatial properties of the hyperspectral image is then fed through a fully convolutional network that eventually predicts the corresponding label of each pixel vector. The proposed approach is tested on three benchmark data sets: the Indian Pines data set, the Salinas data set, and the University of Pavia data set. Performance comparison shows enhanced classification performance of the proposed approach over the current state-of-the-art on the three data sets. Recent advances in saliency detection have utilized deep learning to obtain high level features to detect salient regions in a scene. These advances have demonstrated superior results over previous works that utilize hand-crafted low level features for saliency detection. In this paper, we demonstrate that hand-crafted features can provide complementary information to enhance performance of saliency detection that utilizes only high level features. Our method utilizes both high level and low level features for saliency detection under a unified deep learning framework. The high level features are extracted using the VGG-net, and the low level features are compared with other parts of an image to form a low level distance map. The low level distance map is then encoded using a convolutional neural network(CNN) with multiple 1 1 convolutional and ReLU layers. We concatenate the encoded low level distance map and the high level features, and connect them to a fully connected neural network classifier to evaluate the saliency of a query region. Our experiments show that our method can further improve the performance of stateof-the-art deep learning-based saliency detection methods. Recent advances in saliency detection have utilized deep learning to obtain high level features to detect salient regions in a scene. These advances have demonstrated superior results over previous works that utilize hand-crafted low level features for saliency detection. In this paper, we demonstrate that hand-crafted features can provide complementary information to enhance performance of saliency detection that utilizes only high level features. Our method utilizes both high level and low level features for saliency detection under a unified deep learning framework. The high level features are extracted using the VGG-net, and the low level features are compared with other parts of an image to form a low level distance map. The low level distance map is then encoded using a convolutional neural network(CNN) with multiple 1X1 convolutional and ReLU layers. We concatenate the encoded low level distance map and the high level features, and connect them to a fully connected neural network classifier to evaluate the saliency of a query region. Our experiments show that our method can further improve the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning-based saliency detection methods. Convolutional Neural Networks spread through computer vision like a wildfire, impacting almost all visual tasks imaginable. Despite this, few researchers dare to train their models from scratch. Most work builds on one of a handful of ImageNet pre-trained models, and fine-tunes or adapts these for specific tasks. This is in large part due to the difficulty of properly initializing these networks from scratch. A small miscalibration of the initial weights leads to vanishing or exploding gradients, as well as poor convergence properties. In this work we present a fast and simple data-dependent initialization procedure, that sets the weights of a network such that all units in the network train at roughly the same rate, avoiding vanishing or exploding gradients. Our initialization matches the current state-of-the-art unsupervised or self-supervised pre-training methods on standard computer vision tasks, such as image classification and object detection, while being roughly three orders of magnitude faster. When combined with pre-training methods, our initialization significantly outperforms prior work, narrowing the gap between supervised and unsupervised pre-training. Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similarly striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. The code and models of our paper will be published on: this https URL . Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similar striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. In recent years, the widespread use of deep neural networks (DNNs) has facilitated great improvements in performance for computer vision tasks like image classification and object recognition. In most realistic computer vision applications, an input image undergoes some form of image distortion such as blur and additive noise during image acquisition or transmission. Deep networks trained on pristine images perform poorly when tested on such distortions. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of image distortions like Gaussian blur and additive noise on the activations of pre-trained convolutional filters. We propose a metric to identify the most noise susceptible convolutional filters and rank them in order of the highest gain in classification accuracy upon correction. In our proposed approach called DeepCorrect , we apply small stacks of convolutional layers with residual connections at the output of these ranked filters and train them to correct the worst distortion affected filter activations, while leaving the rest of the pre-trained filter outputs in the network unchanged. Performance results show that applying DeepCorrect models for common vision tasks like image classification (ImageNet), object recognition (Caltech-101, Caltech-256), and scene classification (SUN-397), significantly improves the robustness of DNNs against distorted images and outperforms other alternative approaches. In light of the powerful learning capability of deep neural networks (DNNs), deep (convolutional) models have been built in recent years to address the task of salient object detection. Although training such deep saliency models can significantly improve the detection performance, it requires large-scale manual supervision in the form of pixel-level human annotation, which is highly labor-intensive and time-consuming. To address this problem, this paper makes the earliest effort to train a deep salient object detector without using any human annotation. The key insight is “supervision by fusion”, i.e., generating useful supervisory signals from the fusion process of weak but fast unsupervised saliency models. Based on this insight, we combine an intra-image fusion stream and a inter-image fusion stream in the proposed framework to generate the learning curriculum and pseudo ground-truth for supervising the training of the deep salient object detector. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can approach the same network trained with full supervision (within 2-5 performance gap) and, more encouragingly, even outperform a number of fully supervised state-of-the-art approaches. In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown remarkable performance in many computer vision tasks such as object recognition and detection. However, complex training issues, such as "catastrophic forgetting" and hyper-parameter tuning, make incremental learning in CNNs a difficult challenge. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical deep neural network, with CNNs at multiple levels, and a corresponding training method for lifelong learning. The network grows in a tree-like manner to accommodate the new classes of data without losing the ability to identify the previously trained classes. The proposed network was tested on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, and compared against the method of fine tuning specific layers of a conventional CNN. We obtained comparable accuracies and achieved 40 and 20 reduction in training effort in CIFAR-10 and CIFAR 100 respectively. The network was able to organize the incoming classes of data into feature-driven super-classes. Our model improves upon existing hierarchical CNN models by adding the capability of self-growth and also yields important observations on feature selective classification. In this paper, we aim to predict human eye fixation with view-free scenes based on an end-to-end deep learning architecture. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made substantial improvement on human attention prediction, it is still needed to improve the CNN-based attention models by efficiently leveraging multi-scale features. Our visual attention network is proposed to capture hierarchical saliency information from deep, coarse layers with global saliency information to shallow, fine layers with local saliency response. Our model is based on a skip-layer network structure, which predicts human attention from multiple convolutional layers with various reception fields. Final saliency prediction is achieved via the cooperation of those global and local predictions. Our model is learned in a deep supervision manner, where supervision is directly fed into multi-level layers, instead of previous approaches of providing supervision only at the output layer and propagating this supervision back to earlier layers. Our model thus incorporates multi-level saliency predictions within a single network, which significantly decreases the redundancy of previous approaches of learning multiple network streams with different input scales. Extensive experimental analysis on various challenging benchmark data sets demonstrate our method yields the state-of-the-art performance with competitive inference time. 1 1 Our source code is available at https: github.com wenguanwang deepattention . Salient object detection has recently witnessed substantial progress due to powerful features extracted using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, existing CNN-based methods operate at the patch level instead of the pixel level. Resulting saliency maps are typically blurry, especially near the boundary of salient objects. Furthermore, image patches are treated as independent samples even when they are overlapping, giving rise to significant redundancy in computation and storage. In this CVPR 2016 paper, we propose an end-to-end deep contrast network to overcome the aforementioned limitations. Our deep network consists of two complementary components, a pixel-level fully convolutional stream and a segment-wise spatial pooling stream. The first stream directly produces a saliency map with pixel-level accuracy from an input image. The second stream extracts segment-wise features very efficiently, and better models saliency discontinuities along object boundaries. Finally, a fully connected CRF model can be optionally incorporated to improve spatial coherence and contour localization in the fused result from these two streams. Experimental results demonstrate that our deep model significantly improves the state of the art. Low-level saliency cues or priors do not produce good enough saliency detection results especially when the salient object presents in a low-contrast background with confusing visual appearance. This issue raises a serious problem for conventional approaches. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing a multi-context deep learning framework for salient object detection. We employ deep Convolutional Neural Networks to model saliency of objects in images. Global context and local context are both taken into account, and are jointly modeled in a unified multi-context deep learning framework. To provide a better initialization for training the deep neural networks, we investigate different pre-training strategies, and a task-specific pre-training scheme is designed to make the multi-context modeling suited for saliency detection. Furthermore, recently proposed contemporary deep models in the ImageNet Image Classification Challenge are tested, and their effectiveness in saliency detection are investigated. Our approach is extensively evaluated on five public datasets, and experimental results show significant and consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. Deep neural network is difficult to train and this predicament becomes worse as the depth increases. The essence of this problem exists in the magnitude of backpropagated errors that will result in gradient vanishing or exploding phenomenon. We show that a variant of regularizer which utilizes orthonormality among different filter banks can alleviate this problem. Moreover, we design a backward error modulation mechanism based on the quasi-isometry assumption between two consecutive parametric layers. Equipped with these two ingredients, we propose several novel optimization solutions that can be utilized for training a specific-structured (repetitively triple modules of Conv-BNReLU) extremely deep convolutional neural network (CNN) WITHOUT any shortcuts identity mappings from scratch. Experiments show that our proposed solutions can achieve distinct improvements for a 44-layer and a 110-layer plain networks on both the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Moreover, we can successfully train plain CNNs to match the performance of the residual counterparts. Besides, we propose new principles for designing network structure from the insights evoked by orthonormality. Combined with residual structure, we achieve comparative performance on the ImageNet dataset.