Abstract To optimize fruit production, a portion of the flowers and fruitlets of apple trees must be removed early in the growing season. The proportion to be removed is determined by the bloom intensity, i.e., the number of flowers present in the orchard. Several automated computer vision systems have been proposed to estimate bloom intensity, but their overall performance is still far from satisfactory even in relatively controlled environments. With the goal of devising a technique for flower identification which is robust to clutter and to changes in illumination, this paper presents a method in which a pre-trained convolutional neural network is fine-tuned to become specially sensitive to flowers. Experimental results on a challenging dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms three approaches that represent the state of the art in flower detection, with recall and precision rates higher than 90 . Moreover, a performance assessment on three additional datasets previously unseen by the network, which consist of different flower species and were acquired under different conditions, reveals that the proposed method highly surpasses baseline approaches in terms of generalization capability.
Following the success of Krizhevsky's model @cite_15 in the ImageNet 2012 Challenge, deep learning methods based on CNNs became the dominant approach in many computer vision tasks. The architecture of traditional CNNs consists of a fixed-size input, multiple convolutional layers, pooling (downsampling) layers and fully connected layers @cite_25 . Winner of the ImageNet 2013 Classification task, the Clarifai model is one such network @cite_26 . Illustrated on the right side of Figure , it takes input image portraits of size @math pixels, which traverse a composition of @math convolutional layers (C1-C5) and @math fully connected layers (FC6-FC7 and the softmax FC8). Each type of layer plays a different role within the CNN architecture: while convolutional layers allow feature extraction, the latter fully connected layers act on this information to perform classification.
@cite_15 @cite_26 @cite_25
2289772031 2551829638 2258484932 2606006859
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. Although Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have liberated their power in various computer vision tasks, the most important components of CNN, convolutional layers and fully connected layers, are still limited to linear transformations. In this paper, we propose a novel Factorized Bilinear (FB) layer to model the pairwise feature interactions by considering the quadratic terms in the transformations. Compared with existing methods that tried to incorporate complex non-linearity structures into CNNs, the factorized parameterization makes our FB layer only require a linear increase of parameters and affordable computational cost. To further reduce the risk of overfitting of the FB layer, a specific remedy called DropFactor is devised during the training process. We also analyze the connection between FB layer and some existing models, and show FB layer is a generalization to them. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of FB layer on several widely adopted datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet, and demonstrate superior results compared with various state-of-the-art deep models. 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. The convolutional neural network (CNN), which is one of the deep learning models, has seen much success in a variety of computer vision tasks. However, designing CNN architectures still requires expert knowledge and a lot of trial and error. In this paper, we attempt to automatically construct CNN architectures for an image classification task based on Cartesian genetic programming (CGP). In our method, we adopt highly functional modules, such as convolutional blocks and tensor concatenation, as the node functions in CGP. The CNN structure and connectivity represented by the CGP encoding method are optimized to maximize the validation accuracy. To evaluate the proposed method, we constructed a CNN architecture for the image classification task with the CIFAR-10 dataset. The experimental result shows that the proposed method can be used to automatically find the competitive CNN architecture compared with state-of-the-art models.