In this paper, we propose to incorporate convolutional neural networks with a multi-context attention mechanism into an end-to-end framework for human pose estimation. We adopt stacked hourglass networks to generate attention maps from features at multiple resolutions with various semantics. The Conditional Random Field (CRF) is utilized to model the correlations among neighboring regions in the attention map. We further combine the holistic attention model, which focuses on the global consistency of the full human body, and the body part attention model, which focuses on the detailed description for different body parts. Hence our model has the ability to focus on different granularity from local salient regions to global semantic-consistent spaces. Additionally, we design novel Hourglass Residual Units (HRUs) to increase the receptive field of the network. These units are extensions of residual units with a side branch incorporating filters with larger receptive fields, hence features with various scales are learned and combined within the HRUs. The effectiveness of the proposed multi-context attention mechanism and the hourglass residual units is evaluated on two widely used human pose estimation benchmarks. Our approach outperforms all existing methods on both benchmarks over all the body parts.
Multiple Contextual Information The contextual information is generally referred to as regions surrounding the target locations @cite_19 @cite_16 @cite_31 , object-scene relationships @cite_12 @cite_18 @cite_32 , and object-object interactions @cite_44 . It has been proved efficient in vision tasks as object classification @cite_1 and detection @cite_43 @cite_19 @cite_32 . Recent works modeled contextual information by concatenating multi-scale features @cite_15 @cite_5 , or by gated functions to control the mutual influence of different contexts @cite_24 . The contextual regions, however, are manually defined as rectangles without considering the objects appearance. In this work, we adopt visual attention mechanism to focus on regions which are image dependent and adaptiving for multi-context modeling. Our approach increases the diversity of contexts.
@cite_18 @cite_15 @cite_1 @cite_32 @cite_44 @cite_19 @cite_43 @cite_24 @cite_5 @cite_31 @cite_16 @cite_12
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Object detection, scene graph generation and region captioning, which are three scene understanding tasks at different semantic levels, are tied together: scene graphs are generated on top of objects detected in an image with their pairwise relationship predicted, while region captioning gives a language description of the objects, their attributes, relations and other context information. In this work, to leverage the mutual connections across semantic levels, we propose a novel neural network model, termed as Multi-level Scene Description Network (denoted as MSDN), to solve the three vision tasks jointly in an end-to-end manner. Object, phrase, and caption regions are first aligned with a dynamic graph based on their spatial and semantic connections. Then a feature refining structure is used to pass messages across the three levels of semantic tasks through the graph. We benchmark the learned model on three tasks, and show the joint learning across three tasks with our proposed method can bring mutual improvements over previous models. Particularly, on the scene graph generation task, our proposed method outperforms the stateof- art method with more than 3 margin. Code has been made publicly available. We focus on grounding (i.e., localizing or linking) referring expressions in images, e.g., "largest elephant standing behind baby elephant". This is a general yet challenging vision-language task since it does not only require the localization of objects, but also the multimodal comprehension of context - visual attributes (e.g., "largest", "baby") and relationships (e.g., "behind") that help to distinguish the referent from other objects, especially those of the same category. Due to the exponential complexity involved in modeling the context associated with multiple image regions, existing work oversimplifies this task to pairwise region modeling by multiple instance learning. In this paper, we propose a variational Bayesian method, called Variational Context, to solve the problem of complex context modeling in referring expression grounding. Our model exploits the reciprocal relation between the referent and context, i.e., either of them influences estimation of the posterior distribution of the other, and thereby the search space of context can be greatly reduced. We also extend the model to unsupervised setting where no annotation for the referent is available. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks show consistent improvement over state-of-the-art methods in both supervised and unsupervised settings. The code is available at https: github.com yuleiniu vc . The visual cues from multiple support regions of different sizes and resolutions are complementary in classifying a candidate box in object detection. How to effectively integrate local and contextual visual cues from these regions has become a fundamental problem in object detection. Most existing works simply concatenated features or scores obtained from support regions. In this paper, we proposal a novel gated bi-directional CNN (GBD-Net) to pass messages between features from different support regions during both feature learning and feature extraction. Such message passing can be implemented through convolution in two directions and can be conducted in various layers. Therefore, local and contextual visual patterns can validate the existence of each other by learning their nonlinear relationships and their close iterations are modeled in a much more complex way. It is also shown that message passing is not always helpful depending on individual samples. Gated functions are further introduced to control message transmission and their on-and-off is controlled by extra visual evidence from the input sample. GBD-Net is implemented under the Fast RCNN detection framework. Its effectiveness is shown through experiments on three object detection datasets, ImageNet, Pascal VOC2007 and Microsoft COCO. The visual cues from multiple support regions of different sizes and resolutions are complementary in classifying a candidate box in object detection. Effective integration of local and contextual visual cues from these regions has become a fundamental problem in object detection. In this paper, we propose a gated bi-directional CNN (GBD-Net) to pass messages among features from different support regions during both feature learning and feature extraction. Such message passing can be implemented through convolution between neighboring support regions in two directions and can be conducted in various layers. Therefore, local and contextual visual patterns can validate the existence of each other by learning their nonlinear relationships and their close interactions are modeled in a more complex way. It is also shown that message passing is not always helpful but dependent on individual samples. Gated functions are therefore needed to control message transmission, whose on-or-offs are controlled by extra visual evidence from the input sample. The effectiveness of GBD-Net is shown through experiments on three object detection datasets, ImageNet, Pascal VOC2007 and Microsoft COCO. This paper also shows the details of our approach in wining the ImageNet object detection challenge of 2016, with source code provided on this https URL . 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. Existing approaches to contextual reasoning for enhanced object detection typically utilize other labeled categories in the images to provide contextual information. As a consequence, they inadvertently commit to the granularity of information implicit in the labels. Moreover, large portions of the images may not belong to any of the manually-chosen categories, and these unlabeled regions are typically neglected. In this paper, we overcome both these drawbacks and propose a contextual cue that exploits unlabeled regions in images. Our approach adaptively determines the granularity (scene, inter-object, intra-object, etc.) at which contextual information is captured. In order to extract the proposed contextual cue, we consider a scene to be a structured configuration of objects and regions; just as an object is a composition of parts. We thus learn our proposed “contextual meta-objects” using any off-the-shelf object detector, which makes our proposed cue widely accessible to the community. Our results show that incorporating our proposed cue provides a relative improvement of 12 over a state-of-the-art object detector on the challenging PASCAL dataset. Recognizing multiple labels of images is a fundamental but challenging task in computer vision, and remarkable progress has been attained by localizing semantic-aware image regions and predicting their labels with deep convolutional neural networks. The step of hypothesis regions (region proposals) localization in these existing multi-label image recognition pipelines, however, usually takes redundant computation cost, e.g., generating hundreds of meaningless proposals with non-discriminative information and extracting their features, and the spatial contextual dependency modeling among the localized regions are often ignored or over-simplified. To resolve these issues, this paper proposes a recurrent attention reinforcement learning framework to iteratively discover a sequence of attentional and informative regions that are related to different semantic objects and further predict label scores conditioned on these regions. Besides, our method explicitly models long-term dependencies among these attentional regions that help to capture semantic label co-occurrence and thus facilitate multi-label recognition. Extensive experiments and comparisons on two large-scale benchmarks (i.e., PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO) show that our model achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods in both performance and efficiency as well as explicitly identifying image-level semantic labels to specific object regions. This paper proposes a novel deep architecture to address multi-label image recognition, a fundamental and practical task towards general visual understanding. Current solutions for this task usually rely on an extra step of extracting hypothesis regions (i.e., region proposals), resulting in redundant computation and sub-optimal performance. In this work, we achieve the interpretable and contextualized multi-label image classification by developing a recurrent memorized-attention module. This module consists of two alternately performed components: i) a spatial transformer layer to locate attentional regions from the convolutional feature maps in a region-proposal-free way and ii) an LSTM (Long-Short Term Memory) sub-network to sequentially predict semantic labeling scores on the located regions while capturing the global dependencies of these regions. The LSTM also output the parameters for computing the spatial transformer. On large-scale benchmarks of multi-label image classification (e.g., MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC 07), our approach demonstrates superior performances over other existing state-of-the-arts in both accuracy and efficiency. Exploring contextual information in the local region is important for shape understanding and analysis. Existing studies often employ hand-crafted or explicit ways to encode contextual information of local regions. However, it is hard to capture fine-grained contextual information in hand-crafted or explicit manners, such as the correlation between different areas in a local region, which limits the discriminative ability of learned features. To resolve this issue, we propose a novel deep learning model for 3D point clouds, named Point2Sequence, to learn 3D shape features by capturing fine-grained contextual information in a novel implicit way. Point2Sequence employs a novel sequence learning model for point clouds to capture the correlations by aggregating multi-scale areas of each local region with attention. Specifically, Point2Sequence first learns the feature of each area scale in a local region. Then, it captures the correlation between area scales in the process of aggregating all area scales using a recurrent neural network (RNN) based encoder-decoder structure, where an attention mechanism is proposed to highlight the importance of different area scales. Experimental results show that Point2Sequence achieves state-of-the-art performance in shape classification and segmentation tasks. We present an active learning framework to simultaneously learn appearance and contextual models for scene understanding tasks (multi-class classification). Existing multi-class active learning approaches have focused on utilizing classification uncertainty of regions to select the most ambiguous region for labeling. These approaches, however, ignore the contextual interactions between different regions of the image and the fact that knowing the label for one region provides information about the labels of other regions. For example, the knowledge of a region being sea is informative about regions satisfying the “on” relationship with respect to it, since they are highly likely to be boats. We explicitly model the contextual interactions between regions and select the question which leads to the maximum reduction in the combined entropy of all the regions in the image (image entropy). We also introduce a new methodology of posing labeling questions, mimicking the way humans actively learn about their environment. In these questions, we utilize the regions linked to a concept with high confidence as anchors, to pose questions about the uncertain regions. For example, if we can recognize water in an image then we can use the region associated with water as an anchor to pose questions such as “what is above water?”. Our active learning framework also introduces questions which help in actively learning contextual concepts. For example, our approach asks the annotator: “What is the relationship between boat and water?” and utilizes the answer to reduce the image entropies throughout the training dataset and obtain more relevant training examples for appearance models. Many experiments have shown that the human visual system makes extensive use of contextual information for facilitating object search in natural scenes. However, the question of how to formally model contextual influences is still open. On the basis of a Bayesian framework, the authors present an original approach of attentional guidance by global scene context. The model comprises 2 parallel pathways; one pathway computes local features (saliency) and the other computes global (scene-centered) features. The contextual guidance model of attention combines bottom-up saliency, scene context, and top-down mechanisms at an early stage of visual processing and predicts the image regions likely to be fixated by human observers performing natural search tasks in real-world scenes.