Though tremendous strides have been made in object recognition, one of the remaining open challenges is detecting small objects. We explore three aspects of the problem in the context of finding small faces: the role of scale invariance, image resolution, and contextual reasoning. While most recognition approaches aim to be scale-invariant, the cues for recognizing a 3px tall face are fundamentally different than those for recognizing a 300px tall face. We take a different approach and train separate detectors for different scales. To maintain efficiency, detectors are trained in a multi-task fashion: they make use of features extracted from multiple layers of single (deep) feature hierarchy. While training detectors for large objects is straightforward, the crucial challenge remains training detectors for small objects. We show that context is crucial, and define templates that make use of massively-large receptive fields (where 99 of the template extends beyond the object of interest). Finally, we explore the role of scale in pre-trained deep networks, providing ways to extrapolate networks tuned for limited scales to rather extreme ranges. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on massively-benchmarked face datasets (FDDB and WIDER FACE). In particular, when compared to prior art on WIDER FACE, our results reduce error by a factor of 2 (our models produce an AP of 82 while prior art ranges from 29-64 ).
Context: Context is key to finding small instances as shown in multiple recognition tasks. In object detection, @cite_4 stacks spatial RNNs (IRNN @cite_26 ) model context outside the region of interest and shows improvements on small object detection. In pedestrian detection, @cite_23 uses ground plane estimation as contextual features and improves detection on small instances. In face detection, @cite_14 simultaneously pool ROI features around faces and bodies for scoring detections, which significantly improve overall performance. Our proposed work makes use of large local context (as opposed to a global contextual descriptor @cite_4 @cite_23 ) in a scale-variant way (as opposed to @cite_14 ). We show that context is mostly useful for finding low-resolution faces. Multi-scale representation: Multi-scale representation has been proven useful for many recognition tasks. @cite_0 @cite_21 @cite_3 show that deep multi-scale descriptors (known as hypercolumns'') are useful for semantic segmentation. @cite_4 @cite_10 demonstrate improvements for such models on object detection. @cite_14 pools multi-scale ROI features. Our model uses hypercolumn'' features, pointing out that fine-scale features are most useful for localizing small objects (Sec. and Fig. ).
@cite_14 @cite_26 @cite_4 @cite_21 @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_23 @cite_10
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Pedestrian detection from images is an important and yet challenging task. The conventional methods usually identify human figures using image features inside the local regions. In this paper we present that, besides the local features, context cues in the neighborhood provide important constraints that are not yet well utilized. We propose a framework to incorporate the context constraints for detection. First, we combine the local window with neighborhood windows to construct a multi-scale image context descriptor, designed to represent the contextual cues in spatial, scaling, and color spaces. Second, we develop an iterative classification algorithm called contextual boost. At each iteration, the classifier responses from the previous iteration across the neighborhood and multiple image scales, called classification context, are incorporated as additional features to learn a new classifier. The number of iterations is determined in the training process when the error rate converges. Since the classification context incorporates contextual cues from the neighborhood, through iterations it implicitly propagates to greater areas and thus provides more global constraints. We evaluate our method on the Caltech benchmark dataset [11]. The results confirm the advantages of the proposed framework. Compared with state of the arts, our method reduces the miss rate from 29 by [30] to 25 at 1 false positive per image (FPPI). It is well known that contextual and multi-scale representations are important for accurate visual recognition. In this paper we present the Inside-Outside Net (ION), an object detector that exploits information both inside and outside the region of interest. Contextual information outside the region of interest is integrated using spatial recurrent neural networks. Inside, we use skip pooling to extract information at multiple scales and levels of abstraction. Through extensive experiments we evaluate the design space and provide readers with an overview of what tricks of the trade are important. ION improves state-of-the-art on PASCAL VOC 2012 object detection from 73.9 to 76.4 mAP. On the new and more challenging MS COCO dataset, we improve state-of-art-the from 19.7 to 33.1 mAP. In the 2015 MS COCO Detection Challenge, our ION model won the Best Student Entry and finished 3rd place overall. As intuition suggests, our detection results provide strong evidence that context and multi-scale representations improve small object detection. Modern deep neural network-based object detection methods typically classify candidate proposals using their interior features. However, global and local surrounding contexts that are believed to be valuable for object detection are not fully exploited by existing methods yet. In this work, we take a step towards understanding what is a robust practice to extract and utilize contextual information to facilitate object detection in practice. Specifically, we consider the following two questions: “how to identify useful global contextual information for detecting a certain object?” and “how to exploit local context surrounding a proposal for better inferring its contents?” We provide preliminary answers to these questions through developing a novel attention to context convolution neural network (AC-CNN)-based object detection model. AC-CNN effectively incorporates global and local contextual information into the region-based CNN (e.g., fast R-CNN and faster R-CNN) detection framework and provides better object detection performance. It consists of one attention-based global contextualized (AGC) subnetwork and one multi-scale local contextualized (MLC) subnetwork. To capture global context, the AGC subnetwork recurrently generates an attention map for an input image to highlight useful global contextual locations, through multiple stacked long short-term memory layers. For capturing surrounding local context, the MLC subnetwork exploits both the inside and outside contextual information of each specific proposal at multiple scales. The global and local context are then fused together for making the final decision for detection. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007 and VOC 2012 well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed AC-CNN over well-established baselines. Contexts play an important role in the saliency detection task. However, given a context region, not all contextual information is helpful for the final task. In this paper, we propose a novel pixel-wise contextual attention network, i.e., the PiCANet, to learn to selectively attend to informative context locations for each pixel. Specifically, for each pixel, it can generate an attention map in which each attention weight corresponds to the contextual relevance at each context location. An attended contextual feature can then be constructed by selectively aggregating the contextual information. We formulate the proposed PiCANet in both global and local forms to attend to global and local contexts, respectively. Both models are fully differentiable and can be embedded into CNNs for joint training. We also incorporate the proposed models with the U-Net architecture to detect salient objects. Extensive experiments show that the proposed PiCANets can consistently improve saliency detection performance. The global and local PiCANets facilitate learning global contrast and homogeneousness, respectively. As a result, our saliency model can detect salient objects more accurately and uniformly, thus performing favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.