Because of the powerful learning capability of deep neural networks, counting performance via density map estimation has improved significantly during the past several years. However, it is still very challenging due to severe occlusion, large scale variations, and perspective distortion. Scale variations (from image to image) coupled with perspective distortion (within one image) result in huge scale changes of the object size. Earlier methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) typically did not handle this scale variation explicitly, until Hydra-CNN and MCNN. MCNN uses three columns, each with different filter sizes, to extract features at different scales. In this paper, in contrast to using filters of different sizes, we utilize an image pyramid to deal with scale variations. It is more effective and efficient to resize the input fed into the network, as compared to using larger filter sizes. Secondly, we adaptively fuse the predictions from different scales (using adaptively changing per-pixel weights), which makes our method adapt to scale changes within an image. The adaptive fusing is achieved by generating an across-scale attention map, which softly selects a suitable scale for each pixel, followed by a 1x1 convolution. Extensive experiments on three popular datasets show very compelling results.
@cite_0 uses side information, such as perspective, camera angle and height, as input to adaptively generate convolution weights to adapt feature extraction to the specific scene perspective. However, side information is not always available. MCNN @cite_24 uses 3 columns of convolution layers with the same depth but with different filter sizes. Different columns should respond to objects at different scales, although no explicit supervision is used. MCNN is adopted by several later works @cite_18 @cite_11 . Switch-CNN @cite_18 relies on a classification CNN to classify the image patches to one of the columns to make sure every column is adapted to a particular scale. CP-CNN @cite_11 includes MCNN as a part of their network and further concatenates its feature maps with local and global context features from classification networks.
@cite_0 @cite_18 @cite_24 @cite_11
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Computer vision tasks often have side information available that is helpful to solve the task. For example, for crowd counting, the camera perspective (e.g., camera angle and height) gives a clue about the appearance and scale of people in the scene. While side information has been shown to be useful for counting systems using traditional hand-crafted features, it has not been fully utilized in counting systems based on deep learning. In order to incorporate the available side information, we propose an adaptive convolutional neural network (ACNN), where the convolution filter weights adapt to the current scene context via the side information. In particular, we model the filter weights as a low-dimensional manifold within the high-dimensional space of filter weights. The filter weights are generated using a learned filter manifold'' sub-network, whose input is the side information. With the help of side information and adaptive weights, the ACNN can disentangle the variations related to the side information, and extract discriminative features related to the current context (e.g. camera perspective, noise level, blur kernel parameters). We demonstrate the effectiveness of ACNN incorporating side information on 3 tasks: crowd counting, corrupted digit recognition, and image deblurring. Our experiments show that ACNN improves the performance compared to a plain CNN with a similar number of parameters. Since existing crowd counting datasets do not contain ground-truth side information, we collect a new dataset with the ground-truth camera angle and height as the side information. 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. 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. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) image classifiers are traditionally designed to have sequential convolutional layers with a single output layer. This is based on the assumption that all target classes should be treated equally and exclusively. However, some classes can be more difficult to distinguish than others, and classes may be organized in a hierarchy of categories. At the same time, a CNN is designed to learn internal representations that abstract from the input data based on its hierarchical layered structure. So it is natural to ask if an inverse of this idea can be applied to learn a model that can predict over a classification hierarchy using multiple output layers in decreasing order of class abstraction. In this paper, we introduce a variant of the traditional CNN model named the Branch Convolutional Neural Network (B-CNN). A B-CNN model outputs multiple predictions ordered from coarse to fine along the concatenated convolutional layers corresponding to the hierarchical structure of the target classes, which can be regarded as a form of prior knowledge on the output. To learn with B-CNNs a novel training strategy, named the Branch Training strategy (BT-strategy), is introduced which balances the strictness of the prior with the freedom to adjust parameters on the output layers to minimize the loss. In this way we show that CNN based models can be forced to learn successively coarse to fine concepts in the internal layers at the output stage, and that hierarchical prior knowledge can be adopted to boost CNN models' classification performance. Our models are evaluated to show that the B-CNN extensions improve over the corresponding baseline CNN on the benchmark datasets MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100.