Computer vision is difficult, partly because the desired mathematical function connecting input and output data is often complex, fuzzy and thus hard to learn. Coarse-to-fine (C2F) learning is a promising direction, but it remains unclear how it is applied to a wide range of vision problems. This paper presents a generalized C2F framework by making two technical contributions. First, we provide a unified way of C2F propagation, in which the coarse prediction (a class vector, a detected box, a segmentation mask, etc.) is encoded into a dense (pixel-level) matrix and concatenated to the original input, so that the fine model takes the same design of the coarse model but sees additional information. Second, we present a progressive training strategy which starts with feeding the ground-truth instead of the coarse output into the fine model, and gradually increases the fraction of coarse output, so that at the end of training the fine model is ready for testing. We also relate our approach to curriculum learning by showing that data difficulty keeps increasing during the training process. We apply our framework to three vision tasks including image classification, object localization and semantic segmentation, and demonstrate consistent accuracy gain compared to the baseline training strategy.
Another idea, named coarse-to-fine learning, was based on the observation that a vision model can rethink its prediction to amend errors @cite_46 . Researchers designed several approaches for refining visual recognition in an iterative manner. These approaches can be explained using auto-context @cite_3 or formulated into a fixed-point model @cite_41 . Examples include the coarse-to-fine models for image classification @cite_9 , object detection @cite_1 , semantic segmentation @cite_28 , pose estimation @cite_39 , image captioning @cite_37 , etc . It was verified that joint optimization over coarse and fine stages boosts the performance @cite_27 , which raised an issue of the communication between coarse and fine stages in the training process -- we desire feeding coarse-stage output to fine-stage input, but when the coarse model has not been well optimized, this can lead to unstable performance in optimization. The method proposed in this paper can largely alleviate this issue.
@cite_37 @cite_41 @cite_28 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_39 @cite_27 @cite_46
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Many state-of-the-art approaches for object recognition reduce the problem to a 0-1 classification task. This allows one to leverage sophisticated machine learning techniques for training classifiers from labeled examples. However, these models are typically trained independently for each class using positive and negative examples cropped from images. At test-time, various post-processing heuristics such as non-maxima suppression (NMS) are required to reconcile multiple detections within and between different classes for each image. Though crucial to good performance on benchmarks, this post-processing is usually defined heuristically. We introduce a unified model for multi-class object recognition that casts the problem as a structured prediction task. Rather than predicting a binary label for each image window independently, our model simultaneously predicts a structured labeling of the entire image (Fig. 1). Our model learns statistics that capture the spatial arrangements of various object classes in real images, both in terms of which arrangements to suppress through NMS and which arrangements to favor through spatial co-occurrence statistics. We formulate parameter estimation in our model as a max-margin learning problem. Given training images with ground-truth object locations, we show how to formulate learning as a convex optimization problem. We employ the cutting plane algorithm of (Mach. Learn. 2009) to efficiently learn a model from thousands of training images. We show state-of-the-art results on the PASCAL VOC benchmark that indicate the benefits of learning a global model encapsulating the spatial layout of multiple object classes (a preliminary version of this work appeared in ICCV 2009, , IEEE international conference on computer vision, 2009). We introduce a generic framework that reduces the computational cost of object detection while retaining accuracy for scenarios where objects with varied sizes appear in high resolution images. Detection progresses in a coarse-to-fine manner, first on a down-sampled version of the image and then on a sequence of higher resolution regions identified as likely to improve the detection accuracy. Built upon reinforcement learning, our approach consists of a model (R-net) that uses coarse detection results to predict the potential accuracy gain for analyzing a region at a higher resolution and another model (Q-net) that sequentially selects regions to zoom in. Experiments on the Caltech Pedestrians dataset show that our approach reduces the number of processed pixels by over 50 without a drop in detection accuracy. The merits of our approach become more significant on a high resolution test set collected from YFCC100M dataset, where our approach maintains high detection performance while reducing the number of processed pixels by about 70 and the detection time by over 50 . Finetuning from a pretrained deep model is found to yield state-of-the-art performance for many vision tasks. This paper investigates many factors that influence the performance in finetuning for object detection. There is a longtailed distribution of sample numbers for classes in object detection. Our analysis and empirical results show that classes with more samples have higher impact on the feature learning. And it is better to make the sample number more uniform across classes. Generic object detection can be considered as multiple equally important tasks. Detection of each class is a task. These classes tasks have their individuality in discriminative visual appearance representation. Taking this individuality into account, we cluster objects into visually similar class groups and learn deep representations for these groups separately. A hierarchical feature learning scheme is proposed. In this scheme, the knowledge from the group with large number of classes is transferred for learning features in its subgroups. Finetuned on the GoogLeNet model, experimental results show 4.7 absolute mAP improvement of our approach on the ImageNet object detection dataset without increasing much computational cost at the testing stage. Code is available on www.ee.cuhk.edu.hk ˜wlouyang projects ImageNetFactors CVPR16.html. In the context of fine-grained visual categorization, the ability to interpret models as human-understandable visual manuals is sometimes as important as achieving high classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel Part-Stacked CNN architecture that explicitly explains the finegrained recognition process by modeling subtle differences from object parts. Based on manually-labeled strong part annotations, the proposed architecture consists of a fully convolutional network to locate multiple object parts and a two-stream classification network that encodes object-level and part-level cues simultaneously. By adopting a set of sharing strategies between the computation of multiple object parts, the proposed architecture is very efficient running at 20 frames sec during inference. Experimental results on the CUB-200-2011 dataset reveal the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, from multiple perspectives of classification accuracy, model interpretability, and efficiency. Being able to provide interpretable recognition results in realtime, the proposed method is believed to be effective in practical applications.