For autonomous vehicles to be able to operate successfully they need to be aware of other vehicles with sufficient time to make safe, stable plans. Given the possible closing speeds between two vehicles, this necessitates the ability to accurately detect distant vehicles. Many current image-based object detectors using convolutional neural networks exhibit excellent performance on existing datasets such as KITTI. However, the performance of these networks falls when detecting small (distant) objects. We demonstrate that incorporating radar data can boost performance in these difficult situations. We also introduce an efficient automated method for training data generation using cameras of different focal lengths.
A common approach when training object detectors for a specific task is to pre-train a feature extractor using ImageNet @cite_18 and then fine tune the features with the limited training data available for the task. In @cite_10 Shen show that, given careful network design, it is possible to obtain state of the art results without this pre-training process. This implies that a fusion network, such as the one we are proposing, is not at an insurmountable disadvantage if pre-training is not performed.
@cite_18 @cite_10
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Current CNN based object detectors need initialization from pre-trained ImageNet classification models, which are usually time-consuming. In this paper, we present a fully convolutional feature mimic framework to train very efficient CNN based detectors, which do not need ImageNet pre-training and achieve competitive performance as the large and slow models. We add supervision from high-level features of the large networks in training to help the small network better learn object representation. More specifically, we conduct a mimic method for the features sampled from the entire feature map and use a transform layer to map features from the small network onto the same dimension of the large network. In training the small network, we optimize the similarity between features sampled from the same region on the feature maps of both networks. Extensive experiments are conducted on pedestrian and common object detection tasks using VGG, Inception and ResNet. On both Caltech and Pascal VOC, we show that the modified 2.5&#xd7; accelerated Inception network achieves competitive performance as the full Inception Network. Our faster model runs at 80 FPS for a 1000&#xd7;1500 large input with only a minor degradation of performance on Caltech. 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. 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. We report competitive results on object detection and instance segmentation on the COCO dataset using standard models trained from random initialization. The results are no worse than their ImageNet pre-training counterparts even when using the hyper-parameters of the baseline system (Mask R-CNN) that were optimized for fine-tuning pre-trained models, with the sole exception of increasing the number of training iterations so the randomly initialized models may converge. Training from random initialization is surprisingly robust; our results hold even when: (i) using only 10 of the training data, (ii) for deeper and wider models, and (iii) for multiple tasks and metrics. Experiments show that ImageNet pre-training speeds up convergence early in training, but does not necessarily provide regularization or improve final target task accuracy. To push the envelope we demonstrate 50.9 AP on COCO object detection without using any external data---a result on par with the top COCO 2017 competition results that used ImageNet pre-training. These observations challenge the conventional wisdom of ImageNet pre-training for dependent tasks and we expect these discoveries will encourage people to rethink the current de facto paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning' in computer vision.