Convolutional kernels are basic and vital components of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). In this paper, we equip convolutional kernels with shape attributes to generate the deep Irregular Convolutional Neural Networks (ICNN). Compared to traditional CNN applying regular convolutional kernels like @math , our approach trains irregular kernel shapes to better fit the geometric variations of input features. In other words, shapes are learnable parameters in addition to weights. The kernel shapes and weights are learned simultaneously during end-to-end training with the standard back-propagation algorithm. Experiments for semantic segmentation are implemented to validate the effectiveness of our proposed ICNN.
Deformable Convolutional Networks (DCN) @cite_11 is a recently proposed excellent work which learns irregular kernels too. DCN has a similar thought with Region Proposal Network @cite_2 as they both apply a normal convolution on the input feature and output the new receptive fields for the following operations with respect to each position in feature maps. There are two main insights in this work. First, kernel shapes vary from different spatial positions for the same input feature since that different parts of the same object often have different patterns. Second, kernel shapes vary from different inputs in the same spatial position so that the network could learn unique kernel shapes for different inputs. Different from DCN, we do not apply the above two insights but the shape variances across input channels as we think different feature maps have different feature patterns, in which dimension kernel shapes are remained same by default for DCN. Besides, since our approach is to insert shape attributes into the convolutional layer directly, it can simply update shape parameters by back propagation without any extra layers. We will show that our implementation of ICNN is more concise and can be easily applied to traditional convolutional layers.
@cite_2 @cite_11
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The superior performance of Deformable Convolutional Networks arises from its ability to adapt to the geometric variations of objects. Through an examination of its adaptive behavior, we observe that while the spatial support for its neural features conforms more closely than regular ConvNets to object structure, this support may nevertheless extend well beyond the region of interest, causing features to be influenced by irrelevant image content. To address this problem, we present a reformulation of Deformable ConvNets that improves its ability to focus on pertinent image regions, through increased modeling power and stronger training. The modeling power is enhanced through a more comprehensive integration of deformable convolution within the network, and by introducing a modulation mechanism that expands the scope of deformation modeling. To effectively harness this enriched modeling capability, we guide network training via a proposed feature mimicking scheme that helps the network to learn features that reflect the object focus and classification power of R-CNN features. With the proposed contributions, this new version of Deformable ConvNets yields significant performance gains over the original model and produces leading results on the COCO benchmark for object detection and instance segmentation. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated their ability object detection of very high resolution remote sensing images. However, CNNs have obvious limitations for modeling geometric variations in remote sensing targets. In this paper, we introduced a CNN structure, namely deformable ConvNet, to address geometric modeling in object recognition. By adding offsets to the convolution layers, feature mapping of CNN can be applied to unfixed locations, enhancing CNNs’ visual appearance understanding. In our work, a deformable region-based fully convolutional networks (R-FCN) was constructed by substituting the regular convolution layer with a deformable convolution layer. To efficiently use this deformable convolutional neural network (ConvNet), a training mechanism is developed in our work. We first set the pre-trained R-FCN natural image model as the default network parameters in deformable R-FCN. Then, this deformable ConvNet was fine-tuned on very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. To remedy the increase in lines like false region proposals, we developed aspect ratio constrained non maximum suppression (arcNMS). The precision of deformable ConvNet for detecting objects was then improved. An end-to-end approach was then developed by combining deformable R-FCN, a smart fine-tuning strategy and aspect ratio constrained NMS. The developed method was better than a state-of-the-art benchmark in object detection without data augmentation. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) commonly use generic 'max-pooling' (MP) layers to extract deformation-invariant features, but we argue in favor of a more refined treatment. First, we introduce epitomic con-volution as a building block alternative to the common convolution-MP cascade of DCNNs; while having identical complexity to MP, Epitomic Convolution allows for pa-rameter sharing across different filters, resulting in faster convergence and better generalization. Second, we introduce a Multiple Instance Learning approach to explicitly accommodate global translation and scaling when training a DCNN exclusively with class labels. For this we rely on a 'patchwork' data structure that efficiently lays out all image scales and positions as candidates to a DCNN. Factoring global and local deformations allows a DCNN to 'focus its resources' on the treatment of non-rigid defor-mations and yields a substantial classification accuracy improvement. Third, further pursuing this idea, we develop an efficient DCNN sliding window object detector that employs explicit search over position, scale, and aspect ratio. We provide competitive image classification and localization results on the ImageNet dataset and object detection results on the Pascal VOC 2007 benchmark. Deep convolutional networks (DCNNs) are achieving previously unseen performance in object classification, raising questions about whether DCNNs operate similarly to human vision. In biological vision, shape is arguably the most important cue for recognition. We tested the role of shape information in DCNNs trained to recognize objects. In Experiment 1, we presented a trained DCNN with object silhouettes that preserved overall shape but were filled with surface texture taken from other objects. Shape cues appeared to play some role in the classification of artifacts, but little or none for animals. In Experiments 2–4, DCNNs showed no ability to classify glass figurines or outlines but correctly classified some silhouettes. Aspects of these results led us to hypothesize that DCNNs do not distinguish object’s bounding contours from other edges, and that DCNNs access some local shape features, but not global shape. In Experiment 5, we tested this hypothesis with displays that preserved local features but disrupted global shape, and vice versa. With disrupted global shape, which reduced human accuracy to 28 , DCNNs gave the same classification labels as with ordinary shapes. Conversely, local contour changes eliminated accurate DCNN classification but caused no difficulty for human observers. These results provide evidence that DCNNs have access to some local shape information in the form of local edge relations, but they have no access to global object shapes.