Humans are capable of learning a new fine-grained concept with very little supervision, , few exemplary images for a species of bird, yet our best deep learning systems need hundreds or thousands of labeled examples. In this paper, we try to reduce this gap by studying the fine-grained image recognition problem in a challenging few-shot learning setting, termed few-shot fine-grained recognition (FSFG). The task of FSFG requires the learning systems to build classifiers for novel fine-grained categories from few examples (only one or less than five). To solve this problem, we propose an end-to-end trainable deep network which is inspired by the state-of-the-art fine-grained recognition model and is tailored for the FSFG task. Specifically, our network consists of a bilinear feature learning module and a classifier mapping module: while the former encodes the discriminative information of an exemplar image into a feature vector, the latter maps the intermediate feature into the decision boundary of the novel category. The key novelty of our model is a "piecewise mappings" function in the classifier mapping module, which generates the decision boundary via learning a set of more attainable sub-classifiers in a more parameter-economic way. We learn the exemplar-to-classifier mapping based on an auxiliary dataset in a meta-learning fashion, which is expected to be able to generalize to novel categories. By conducting comprehensive experiments on three fine-grained datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance over the competing baselines.
However, current fine-grained recognition systems assume a set of categories known , despite the obviously dynamic and open nature of the visual world @cite_20 @cite_0 @cite_19 . Compared with previous work, we are the first to study fine-grained image recognition in a challenging few-shot learning setting where the model is required to recognize novel fine-grained categories by only a few labeled images.
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Abstract Fine-grained recognition is one of the most difficult topics in visual recognition, which aims at distinguishing confusing categories such as bird species within a genus. The information of part and bounding boxes in fine-grained images is very important for improving the performance. However, in real applications, the part and or bounding box annotations may not exist. This makes fine-grained recognition a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a jointly trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to solve the fine-grained recognition problem without using part and bounding box information. In this framework, we first detect part candidates by calculating the gradients of feature maps of a trained CNN model w.r.t. the input image and then filter out unnecessary ones by fusing two saliency detection methods. Meanwhile, two groups of global object locations are obtained based on the saliency detection methods and a segmentation method. With the filtered part candidates and approximate object locations as inputs, we construct the CNN architecture with local parts and global discrimination (LG-CNN) which consists of two CNN networks with shared weights. The upper stream of LG-CNN is focused on the part information of the input image, the bottom stream of LG-CNN is focused on the global input image. LG-CNN is jointly trained by two stream loss functions to guide the updating of the shared weights. Experiments on three popular fine-grained datasets well validate the effectiveness of our proposed LG-CNN architecture. Applying our LG-CNN architecture to generic object recognition datasets also yields superior performance over the directly fine-tuned CNN architecture with a large margin. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have seen tremendous success in large-scale generic object recognition. In comparison with generic object recognition, fine-grained image classification (FGIC) is much more challenging because (i) fine-grained labeled data is much more expensive to acquire (usually requiring domain expertise); (ii) there exists large intra-class and small inter-class variance. Most recent work exploiting deep CNN for image recognition with small training data adopts a simple strategy: pre-train a deep CNN on a large-scale external dataset (e.g., ImageNet) and fine-tune on the small-scale target data to fit the specific classification task. In this paper, beyond the fine-tuning strategy, we propose a systematic framework of learning a deep CNN that addresses the challenges from two new perspectives: (i) identifying easily annotated hyper-classes inherent in the fine-grained data and acquiring a large number of hyper-class-labeled images from readily available external sources (e.g., image search engines), and formulating the problem into multitask learning; (ii) a novel learning model by exploiting a regularization between the fine-grained recognition model and the hyper-class recognition model. We demonstrate the success of the proposed framework on two small-scale fine-grained datasets (Stanford Dogs and Stanford Cars) and on a large-scale car dataset that we collected. Abstract Fine-grained image recognition is a challenging computer vision problem, due to the small inter-class variations caused by highly similar subordinate categories, and the large intra-class variations in poses, scales and rotations. In this paper, we prove that selecting useful deep descriptors contributes well to fine-grained image recognition. Specifically, a novel Mask-CNN model without the fully connected layers is proposed. Based on the part annotations, the proposed model consists of a fully convolutional network to both locate the discriminative parts ( e.g. , head and torso), and more importantly generate weighted object part masks for selecting useful and meaningful convolutional descriptors. After that, a three-stream Mask-CNN model is built for aggregating the selected object- and part-level descriptors simultaneously. Thanks to discarding the parameter redundant fully connected layers, our Mask-CNN has a small feature dimensionality and efficient inference speed by comparing with other fine-grained approaches. Furthermore, we obtain a new state-of-the-art accuracy on two challenging fine-grained bird species categorization datasets, which validates the effectiveness of both the descriptor selection scheme and the proposed Mask-CNN model. While fine-grained object recognition is an important problem in computer vision, current models are unlikely to accurately classify objects in the wild. These fully supervised models need additional annotated images to classify objects in every new scenario, a task that is infeasible. However, sources such as e-commerce websites and field guides provide annotated images for many classes. In this work, we study fine-grained domain adaptation as a step towards overcoming the dataset shift between easily acquired annotated images and the real world. Adaptation has not been studied in the fine-grained setting where annotations such as attributes could be used to increase performance. Our work uses an attribute based multi-task adaptation loss to increase accuracy from a baseline of 4.1 to 19.1 in the semi-supervised adaptation case. Prior do- main adaptation works have been benchmarked on small datasets such as [46] with a total of 795 images for some domains, or simplistic datasets such as [41] consisting of digits. We perform experiments on a subset of a new challenging fine-grained dataset consisting of 1,095,021 images of 2, 657 car categories drawn from e-commerce web- sites and Google Street View.