Current fine-grained classification approaches often rely on a robust localization of object parts to extract localized feature representations suitable for discrimination. However, part localization is a challenging task due to the large variation of appearance and pose. In this paper, we show how pre-trained convolutional neural networks can be used for robust and efficient object part discovery and localization without the necessity to actually train the network on the current dataset. Our approach called "part detector discovery" (PDD) is based on analyzing the gradient maps of the network outputs and finding activation centers spatially related to annotated semantic parts or bounding boxes. This allows us not just to obtain excellent performance on the CUB200-2011 dataset, but in contrast to previous approaches also to perform detection and bird classification jointly without requiring a given bounding box annotation during testing and ground-truth parts during training. The code is available at this http URL and this https URL
Entirely replacing the low-level features is difficult, because a CNN produces global features. Zou al @cite_16 solves this by associating the output of a hidden layer with spatially related parts of the input. This allows them to apply the regionlets approach. However, their approach requires numerous evaluations of the CNN and the features are not arbitrarily dense. In contrast, our approach is working on the full resolution of the input.
@cite_16
2963270367 2892998444 2964101377 2381998130 2565392216 2788343277 2749407104 2950275949 2289772031 2147347568 1556540526 2508741746 2963814095 2258484932 2795824235 2468075278 2338972621 2098676252 2792161633 1524680991
Deep convolutional networks (CNNs) have exhibited their potential in image inpainting for producing plausible results. However, in most existing methods, e.g., context encoder, the missing parts are predicted by propagating the surrounding convolutional features through a fully connected layer, which intends to produce semantically plausible but blurry result. In this paper, we introduce a special shift-connection layer to the U-Net architecture, namely Shift-Net, for filling in missing regions of any shape with sharp structures and fine-detailed textures. To this end, the encoder feature of the known region is shifted to serve as an estimation of the missing parts. A guidance loss is introduced on decoder feature to minimize the distance between the decoder feature after fully connected layer and the ground-truth encoder feature of the missing parts. With such constraint, the decoder feature in missing region can be used to guide the shift of encoder feature in known region. An end-to-end learning algorithm is further developed to train the Shift-Net. Experiments on the Paris StreetView and Places datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our Shift-Net in producing sharper, fine-detailed, and visually plausible results. The codes and pre-trained models are available at https: github.com Zhaoyi-Yan Shift-Net. The performance of single image super-resolution has achieved significant improvement by utilizing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The features in deep CNN contain different types of information which make different contributions to image reconstruction. However, most CNN-based models lack discriminative ability for different types of information and deal with them equally, which results in the representational capacity of the models being limited. On the other hand, as the depth of neural networks grows, the long-term information coming from preceding layers is easy to be weaken or lost in late layers, which is adverse to super-resolving image. To capture more informative features and maintain long-term information for image super-resolution, we propose a channel-wise and spatial feature modulation (CSFM) network in which a sequence of feature-modulation memory (FMM) modules is cascaded with a densely connected structure to transform low-resolution features to high informative features. In each FMM module, we construct a set of channel-wise and spatial attention residual (CSAR) blocks and stack them in a chain structure to dynamically modulate multi-level features in a global-and-local manner. This feature modulation strategy enables the high contribution information to be enhanced and the redundant information to be suppressed. Meanwhile, for long-term information persistence, a gated fusion (GF) node is attached at the end of the FMM module to adaptively fuse hierarchical features and distill more effective information via the dense skip connections and the gating mechanism. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on benchmark datasets illustrate the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods. A very deep convolutional neural network (CNN) has recently achieved great success for image super-resolution (SR) and offered hierarchical features as well. However, most deep CNN based SR models do not make full use of the hierarchical features from the original low-resolution (LR) images, thereby achieving relatively-low performance. In this paper, we propose a novel residual dense network (RDN) to address this problem in image SR. We fully exploit the hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers. Specifically, we propose residual dense block (RDB) to extract abundant local features via dense connected convolutional layers. RDB further allows direct connections from the state of preceding RDB to all the layers of current RDB, leading to a contiguous memory (CM) mechanism. Local feature fusion in RDB is then used to adaptively learn more effective features from preceding and current local features and stabilizes the training of wider network. After fully obtaining dense local features, we use global feature fusion to jointly and adaptively learn global hierarchical features in a holistic way. Experiments on benchmark datasets with different degradation models show that our RDN achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods. CNN architectures have terrific recognition performance but rely on spatial pooling which makes it difficult to adapt them to tasks that require dense pixel-accurate labeling. This paper makes two contributions: (1) We demonstrate that while the apparent spatial resolution of convolutional feature maps is low, the high-dimensional feature representation contains significant sub-pixel localization information. (2) We describe a multi-resolution reconstruction architecture, akin to a Laplacian pyramid, that uses skip connections from higher resolution feature maps to successively refine segment boundaries reconstructed from lower resolution maps. This approach yields state-of-the-art semantic segmentation results on PASCAL without resorting to more complex CRF or detection driven architectures. The extreme variability in the appearance of a place across the four seasons of the year is one of the most challenging problems in life-long visual topological localization for mobile robotic systems and intelligent vehicles. Traditional solutions to this problem are based on the description of images using hand-crafted features, which have been shown to offer moderate invariance against seasonal changes. In this paper, we present a new proposal focused on automatically learned descriptors, which are processed by means of a technique recently popularized in the computer vision community: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The novelty of our approach relies on fusing the image information from multiple convolutional layers at several levels and granularities. In addition, we compress the redundant data of CNN features into a tractable number of bits for efficient and robust place recognition. The final descriptor is reduced by applying simple compression and binarization techniques for fast matching using the Hamming distance. An exhaustive experimental evaluation confirms the improved performance of our proposal (CNN-VTL) with respect to state-of-the-art methods over varied long-term datasets recorded across seasons. A very deep convolutional neural network (CNN) has recently achieved great success for image super-resolution (SR) and offered hierarchical features as well. However, most deep CNN based SR models do not make full use of the hierarchical features from the original low-resolution (LR) images, thereby achieving relatively-low performance. In this paper, we propose a novel residual dense network (RDN) to address this problem in image SR. We fully exploit the hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers. Specifically, we propose residual dense block (RDB) to extract abundant local features via dense connected convolutional layers. RDB further allows direct connections from the state of preceding RDB to all the layers of current RDB, leading to a contiguous memory (CM) mechanism. Local feature fusion in RDB is then used to adaptively learn more effective features from preceding and current local features and stabilizes the training of wider network. After fully obtaining dense local features, we use global feature fusion to jointly and adaptively learn global hierarchical features in a holistic way. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets with different degradation models show that our RDN achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we present a robust method for scene recognition, which leverages Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) features and Sparse Coding setting by creating a new representation of indoor scenes. Although CNNs highly benefited the fields of computer vision and pattern recognition, convolutional layers adjust weights on a global-approach, which might lead to losing important local details such as objects and small structures. Our proposed scene representation relies on both: global features that mostly refers to environment’s structure, and local features that are sparsely combined to capture characteristics of common objects of a given scene. This new representation is based on fragments of the scene and leverages features extracted by CNNs. The experimental evaluation shows that the resulting representation outperforms previous scene recognition methods on Scene15 and MIT67 datasets, and performs competitively on SUN397, while being highly robust to perturbations in the input image such as noise and occlusion. In this paper we evaluate the quality of the activation layers of a convolutional neural network (CNN) for the gen- eration of object proposals. We generate hypotheses in a sliding-window fashion over different activation layers and show that the final convolutional layers can find the object of interest with high recall but poor localization due to the coarseness of the feature maps. Instead, the first layers of the network can better localize the object of interest but with a reduced recall. Based on this observation we design a method for proposing object locations that is based on CNN features and that combines the best of both worlds. We build an inverse cascade that, going from the final to the initial convolutional layers of the CNN, selects the most promising object locations and refines their boxes in a coarse-to-fine manner. The method is efficient, because i) it uses the same features extracted for detection, ii) it aggregates features using integral images, and iii) it avoids a dense evaluation of the proposals due to the inverse coarse-to-fine cascade. The method is also accurate; it outperforms most of the previously proposed object proposals approaches and when plugged into a CNN-based detector produces state-of-the- art detection performance. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved remarkable successes in various image classification and understanding tasks. The deep features obtained at the top fully connected layer of the CNN (FC-features) exhibit rich global semantic information and are extremely effective in image classification. On the other hand, the convolutional features in the middle layers of the CNN also contain meaningful local information, but are not fully explored for image representation. In this paper, we propose a novel locally supervised deep hybrid model (LS-DHM) that effectively enhances and explores the convolutional features for scene recognition. First, we notice that the convolutional features capture local objects and fine structures of scene images, which yield important cues for discriminating ambiguous scenes, whereas these features are significantly eliminated in the highly compressed FC representation. Second, we propose a new local convolutional supervision layer to enhance the local structure of the image by directly propagating the label information to the convolutional layers. Third, we propose an efficient Fisher convolutional vector (FCV) that successfully rescues the orderless mid-level semantic information (e.g., objects and textures) of scene image. The FCV encodes the large-sized convolutional maps into a fixed-length mid-level representation, and is demonstrated to be strongly complementary to the high-level FC-features. Finally, both the FCV and FC-features are collaboratively employed in the LS-DHM representation, which achieves outstanding performance in our experiments. It obtains 83.75 and 67.56 accuracies, respectively, on the heavily benchmarked MIT Indoor67 and SUN397 data sets, advancing the state-of-the-art substantially. In this paper we evaluate the quality of the activation layers of a convolutional neural network (CNN) for the generation of object proposals. We generate hypotheses in a sliding-window fashion over different activation layers and show that the final convolutional layers can find the object of interest with high recall but poor localization due to the coarseness of the feature maps. Instead, the first layers of the network can better localize the object of interest but with a reduced recall. Based on this observation we design a method for proposing object locations that is based on CNN features and that combines the best of both worlds. We build an inverse cascade that, going from the final to the initial convolutional layers of the CNN, selects the most promising object locations and refines their boxes in a coarse-to-fine manner. The method is efficient, because i) it uses the same features extracted for detection, ii) it aggregates features using integral images, and iii) it avoids a dense evaluation of the proposals due to the inverse coarse-to-fine cascade. The method is also accurate, it outperforms most of the previously proposed object proposals approaches and when plugged into a CNN-based detector produces state-of-the-art detection performance. We propose a local modelling approach using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for fine-grained image classification. Recently, deep CNNs trained from large datasets have considerably improved the performance of object recognition. However, to date there has been limited work using these deep CNNs as local feature extractors. This partly stems from CNNs having internal representations which are high dimensional, thereby making such representations difficult to model using stochastic models. To overcome this issue, we propose to reduce the dimensionality of one of the internal fully connected layers, in conjunction with layer-restricted retraining to avoid retraining the entire network. The distribution of low-dimensional features obtained from the modified layer is then modelled using a Gaussian mixture model. Comparative experiments show that considerable performance improvements can be achieved on the challenging Fish and UEC FOOD-100 datasets. CNN architectures have terrific recognition performance but rely on spatial pooling which makes it difficult to adapt them to tasks that require dense, pixel-accurate labeling. This paper makes two contributions: (1) We demonstrate that while the apparent spatial resolution of convolutional feature maps is low, the high-dimensional feature representation contains significant sub-pixel localization information. (2) We describe a multi-resolution reconstruction architecture based on a Laplacian pyramid that uses skip connections from higher resolution feature maps and multiplicative gating to successively refine segment boundaries reconstructed from lower-resolution maps. This approach yields state-of-the-art semantic segmentation results on the PASCAL VOC and Cityscapes segmentation benchmarks without resorting to more complex random-field inference or instance detection driven architectures. Despite that convolutional neural networks (CNN) have recently demonstrated high-quality reconstruction for single-image super-resolution (SR), recovering natural and realistic texture remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we show that it is possible to recover textures faithful to semantic classes. In particular, we only need to modulate features of a few intermediate layers in a single network conditioned on semantic segmentation probability maps. This is made possible through a novel Spatial Feature Transform (SFT) layer that generates affine transformation parameters for spatial-wise feature modulation. SFT layers can be trained end-to-end together with the SR network using the same loss function. During testing, it accepts an input image of arbitrary size and generates a high-resolution image with just a single forward pass conditioned on the categorical priors. Our final results show that an SR network equipped with SFT can generate more realistic and visually pleasing textures in comparison to state-of-the-art SRGAN [27] and EnhanceNet [38]. Convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved the state-of-the-art performance in many different visual tasks. Learned from a large-scale training data set, CNN features are much more discriminative and accurate than the handcrafted features. Moreover, CNN features are also transferable among different domains. On the other hand, traditional dictionary-based features (such as BoW and spatial pyramid matching) contain much more local discriminative and structural information, which is implicitly embedded in the images. To further improve the performance, in this paper, we propose to combine CNN with dictionary-based models for scene recognition and visual domain adaptation (DA). Specifically, based on the well-tuned CNN models (e.g., AlexNet and VGG Net), two dictionary-based representations are further constructed, namely, mid-level local representation (MLR) and convolutional Fisher vector (CFV) representation. In MLR, an efficient two-stage clustering method, i.e., weighted spatial and feature space spectral clustering on the parts of a single image followed by clustering all representative parts of all images, is used to generate a class-mixture or a class-specific part dictionary. After that, the part dictionary is used to operate with the multiscale image inputs for generating mid-level representation. In CFV, a multiscale and scale-proportional Gaussian mixture model training strategy is utilized to generate Fisher vectors based on the last convolutional layer of CNN. By integrating the complementary information of MLR, CFV, and the CNN features of the fully connected layer, the state-of-the-art performance can be achieved on scene recognition and DA problems. An interested finding is that our proposed hybrid representation (from VGG net trained on ImageNet) is also complementary to GoogLeNet and or VGG-11 (trained on Place205) greatly. Despite that convolutional neural networks (CNN) have recently demonstrated high-quality reconstruction for single-image super-resolution (SR), recovering natural and realistic texture remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we show that it is possible to recover textures faithful to semantic classes. In particular, we only need to modulate features of a few intermediate layers in a single network conditioned on semantic segmentation probability maps. This is made possible through a novel Spatial Feature Transform (SFT) layer that generates affine transformation parameters for spatial-wise feature modulation. SFT layers can be trained end-to-end together with the SR network using the same loss function. During testing, it accepts an input image of arbitrary size and generates a high-resolution image with just a single forward pass conditioned on the categorical priors. Our final results show that an SR network equipped with SFT can generate more realistic and visually pleasing textures in comparison to state-of-the-art SRGAN and EnhanceNet. Since Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the leading learning paradigm in visual recognition, Naive Bayes Nearest Neighbor (NBNN)-based classifiers have lost momentum in the community. This is because (1) such algorithms cannot use CNN activations as input features, (2) they cannot be used as final layer of CNN architectures for end-to-end training, and (3) they are generally not scalable and hence cannot handle big data. This paper proposes a framework that addresses all these issues, thus bringing back NBNNs on the map. We solve the first by extracting CNN activations from local patches at multiple scale levels, similarly to [13]. We address simultaneously the second and third by proposing a scalable version of Naive Bayes Non-linear Learning (NBNL, [7]). Results obtained using pre-trained CNNs on standard scene and domain adaptation databases show the strength of our approach, opening a new season for NBNNs. 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. Learning efficient image representations is at the core of the scene classification task of remote sensing imagery. The existing methods for solving the scene classification task, based on either feature coding approaches with low-level hand-engineered features or unsupervised feature learning, can only generate mid-level image features with limited representative ability, which essentially prevents them from achieving better performance. Recently, the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are hierarchical architectures trained on large-scale datasets, have shown astounding performance in object recognition and detection. However, it is still not clear how to use these deep convolutional neural networks for high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) scene classification. In this paper, we investigate how to transfer features from these successfully pre-trained CNNs for HRRS scene classification. We propose two scenarios for generating image features via extracting CNN features from different layers. In the first scenario, the activation vectors extracted from fully-connected layers are regarded as the final image features; in the second scenario, we extract dense features from the last convolutional layer at multiple scales and then encode the dense features into global image features through commonly used feature coding approaches. Extensive experiments on two public scene classification datasets demonstrate that the image features obtained by the two proposed scenarios, even with a simple linear classifier, can result in remarkable performance and improve the state-of-the-art by a significant margin. The results reveal that the features from pre-trained CNNs generalize well to HRRS datasets and are more expressive than the low- and mid-level features. Moreover, we tentatively combine features extracted from different CNN models for better performance. Abstract In this paper, a vehicle color recognition method using lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed. Firstly, a lightweight CNN network architecture is specifically designed for the recognition task, which contains five layers, i.e. three convolutional layers, a global pooling layer and a fully connected layer. Different from the existing CNN based methods that only use the features output from the final layer for recognition, in this paper, the feature maps of intermediate convolutional layers are all applied for recognition based on the fact that these convolutional features can provide hierarchical representations of the images. Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM) strategy is adopted to divide the feature map, and each SPM sub-region is encoded to generate a feature representation vector. These feature representation vectors of convolutional layers and the output feature vector of the global pooling layer are normalized and cascaded as a whole feature vector, which is finally utilized to train Support Vector Machine classifier to obtain the recognition model. The experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-art methods, the proposed method can obtain more than 0.7 higher recognition accuracy, up to 95.41 , while the dimensionality of the feature vector is only 18 and the memory footprint is only 0.5 . Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown their promise as a universal representation for recognition. However, global CNN activations lack geometric invariance, which limits their robustness for classification and matching of highly variable scenes. To improve the invariance of CNN activations without degrading their discriminative power, this paper presents a simple but effective scheme called multi-scale orderless pooling (MOP-CNN). This scheme extracts CNN activations for local patches at multiple scale levels, performs orderless VLAD pooling of these activations at each level separately, and concatenates the result. The resulting MOP-CNN representation can be used as a generic feature for either supervised or unsupervised recognition tasks, from image classification to instance-level retrieval; it consistently outperforms global CNN activations without requiring any joint training of prediction layers for a particular target dataset. In absolute terms, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the challenging SUN397 and MIT Indoor Scenes classification datasets, and competitive results on ILSVRC2012 2013 classification and INRIA Holidays retrieval datasets.