Understanding driving situations regardless the conditions of the traffic scene is a cornerstone on the path towards autonomous vehicles; however, despite common sensor setups already include complementary devices such as LiDAR or radar, most of the research on perception systems has traditionally focused on computer vision. We present a LiDAR-based 3D object detection pipeline entailing three stages. First, laser information is projected into a novel cell encoding for bird's eye view projection. Later, both object location on the plane and its heading are estimated through a convolutional neural network originally designed for image processing. Finally, 3D oriented detections are computed in a post-processing phase. Experiments on KITTI dataset show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results among comparable methods. Further tests with different LiDAR sensors in real scenarios assess the multi-device capabilities of the approach.
Research on autonomous perception has commonly focused on modeling advanced hand-crafted features, such as HoG @cite_16 or Haar @cite_12 . Nonetheless, since the emergence of modern Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and large-scale image datasets such as ImageNet @cite_19 , object detection studies have progressively moved towards feature learning approaches, which produce more robust representations of objects, increasing the performance on classification tasks.
@cite_19 @cite_16 @cite_12
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Learning efficient image representations is at the core of the scene classification task of remote sensing imagery. The existing methods for solving the scene classification task, based on either feature coding approaches with low-level hand-engineered features or unsupervised feature learning, can only generate mid-level image features with limited representative ability, which essentially prevents them from achieving better performance. Recently, the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are hierarchical architectures trained on large-scale datasets, have shown astounding performance in object recognition and detection. However, it is still not clear how to use these deep convolutional neural networks for high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) scene classification. In this paper, we investigate how to transfer features from these successfully pre-trained CNNs for HRRS scene classification. We propose two scenarios for generating image features via extracting CNN features from different layers. In the first scenario, the activation vectors extracted from fully-connected layers are regarded as the final image features; in the second scenario, we extract dense features from the last convolutional layer at multiple scales and then encode the dense features into global image features through commonly used feature coding approaches. Extensive experiments on two public scene classification datasets demonstrate that the image features obtained by the two proposed scenarios, even with a simple linear classifier, can result in remarkable performance and improve the state-of-the-art by a significant margin. The results reveal that the features from pre-trained CNNs generalize well to HRRS datasets and are more expressive than the low- and mid-level features. Moreover, we tentatively combine features extracted from different CNN models for better performance. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has demonstrated promising performance in single-label image classification tasks. However, how CNN best copes with multi-label images still remains an open problem, mainly due to the complex underlying object layouts and insufficient multi-label training images. In this work, we propose a flexible deep CNN infrastructure, called Hypotheses-CNN-Pooling (HCP), where an arbitrary number of object segment hypotheses are taken as the inputs, then a shared CNN is connected with each hypothesis, and finally the CNN output results from different hypotheses are aggregated with max pooling to produce the ultimate multi-label predictions. Some unique characteristics of this flexible deep CNN infrastructure include: 1) no ground-truth bounding box information is required for training; 2) the whole HCP infrastructure is robust to possibly noisy and or redundant hypotheses; 3) the shared CNN is flexible and can be well pre-trained with a large-scale single-label image dataset, e.g., ImageNet; and 4) it may naturally output multi-label prediction results. Experimental results on Pascal VOC 2007 and VOC 2012 multi-label image datasets well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HCP infrastructure over other state-of-the-arts. In particular, the mAP reaches 90.5 by HCP only and 93.2 after the fusion with our complementary result in [12] based on hand-crafted features on the VOC 2012 dataset. This paper addresses the problem of image features selection for pedestrian gender recognition. Hand-crafted features (such as HOG) are compared with learned features which are obtained by training convolutional neural networks. The comparison is performed on the recently created collection of versatile pedestrian datasets which allows us to evaluate the impact of dataset properties on the performance of features. The study shows that hand-crafted and learned features perform equally well on small-sized homogeneous datasets. However, learned features significantly outperform hand-crafted ones in the case of heterogeneous and unfamiliar (unseen) datasets. Our best model which is based on learned features obtains 79 average recognition rate on completely unseen datasets. We also show that a relatively small convolutional neural network is able to produce competitive features even with little training data. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have recently shown outstanding image classification performance in the large- scale visual recognition challenge (ILSVRC2012). The suc- cess of CNNs is attributed to their ability to learn rich mid- level image representations as opposed to hand-designed low-level features used in other image classification meth- ods. Learning CNNs, however, amounts to estimating mil- lions of parameters and requires a very large number of annotated image samples. This property currently prevents application of CNNs to problems with limited training data. In this work we show how image representations learned with CNNs on large-scale annotated datasets can be effi- ciently transferred to other visual recognition tasks with limited amount of training data. We design a method to reuse layers trained on the ImageNet dataset to compute mid-level image representation for images in the PASCAL VOC dataset. We show that despite differences in image statistics and tasks in the two datasets, the transferred rep- resentation leads to significantly improved results for object and action classification, outperforming the current state of the art on Pascal VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets. We also show promising results for object and action localization. This paper presents a new state-of-the-art for document image classification and retrieval, using features learned by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In object and scene analysis, deep neural nets are capable of learning a hierarchical chain of abstraction from pixel inputs to concise and descriptive representations. The current work explores this capacity in the realm of document analysis, and confirms that this representation strategy is superior to a variety of popular hand-crafted alternatives. Experiments also show that (i) features extracted from CNNs are robust to compression, (ii) CNNs trained on non-document images transfer well to document analysis tasks, and (iii) enforcing region-specific feature-learning is unnecessary given sufficient training data. This work also makes available a new labelled subset of the IIT-CDIP collection, containing 400,000 document images across 16 categories, useful for training new CNNs for document analysis. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are commonly thought to recognise objects by learning increasingly complex representations of object shapes. Some recent studies suggest a more important role of image textures. We here put these conflicting hypotheses to a quantitative test by evaluating CNNs and human observers on images with a texture-shape cue conflict. We show that ImageNet-trained CNNs are strongly biased towards recognising textures rather than shapes, which is in stark contrast to human behavioural evidence and reveals fundamentally different classification strategies. We then demonstrate that the same standard architecture (ResNet-50) that learns a texture-based representation on ImageNet is able to learn a shape-based representation instead when trained on "Stylized-ImageNet", a stylized version of ImageNet. This provides a much better fit for human behavioural performance in our well-controlled psychophysical lab setting (nine experiments totalling 48,560 psychophysical trials across 97 observers) and comes with a number of unexpected emergent benefits such as improved object detection performance and previously unseen robustness towards a wide range of image distortions, highlighting advantages of a shape-based representation. Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have shown excellent results on many visual classification tasks. With the exception of ImageNet, these datasets are carefully crafted such that objects are well-aligned at similar scales. Naturally, the feature learning problem gets more challenging as the amount of variation in the data increases, as the models have to learn to be invariant to certain changes in appearance. Recent results on the ImageNet dataset show that given enough data, ConvNets can learn such invariances producing very discriminative features [1]. But could we do more: use less parameters, less data, learn more discriminative features, if certain invariances were built into the learning process? In this paper we present a simple model that allows ConvNets to learn features in a locally scale-invariant manner without increasing the number of model parameters. We show on a modified MNIST dataset that when faced with scale variation, building in scale-invariance allows ConvNets to learn more discriminative features with reduced chances of over-fitting. With the success of new computational architectures for visual processing, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) and access to image databases with millions of labeled examples (e.g., ImageNet, Places), the state of the art in computer vision is advancing rapidly. One important factor for continued progress is to understand the representations that are learned by the inner layers of these deep architectures. Here we show that object detectors emerge from training CNNs to perform scene classification. As scenes are composed of objects, the CNN for scene classification automatically discovers meaningful objects detectors, representative of the learned scene categories. With object detectors emerging as a result of learning to recognize scenes, our work demonstrates that the same network can perform both scene recognition and object localization in a single forward-pass, without ever having been explicitly taught the notion of objects. Facial action units (AU) are the fundamental units to decode human facial expressions. At least three aspects affect performance of automated AU detection: spatial representation, temporal modeling, and AU correlation. Unlike most studies that tackle these aspects separately, we propose a hybrid network architecture to jointly model them. Specifically, spatial representations are extracted by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which, as analyzed in this paper, is able to reduce person-specific biases caused by hand-crafted descriptors (e.g., HOG and Gabor). To model temporal dependencies, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs) are stacked on top of these representations, regardless of the lengths of input videos. The outputs of CNNs and LSTMs are further aggregated into a fusion network to produce per-frame prediction of 12 AUs. Our network naturally addresses the three issues together, and yields superior performance compared to existing methods that consider these issues independently. Extensive experiments were conducted on two large spontaneous datasets, GFT and BP4D, with more than 400,000 frames coded with 12 AUs. On both datasets, we report improvements over a standard multi-label CNN and feature-based state-of-the-art. Finally, we provide visualization of the learned AU models, which, to our best knowledge, reveal how machines see AUs for the first time. Abstract: With the success of new computational architectures for visual processing, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) and access to image databases with millions of labeled examples (e.g., ImageNet, Places), the state of the art in computer vision is advancing rapidly. One important factor for continued progress is to understand the representations that are learned by the inner layers of these deep architectures. Here we show that object detectors emerge from training CNNs to perform scene classification. As scenes are composed of objects, the CNN for scene classification automatically discovers meaningful objects detectors, representative of the learned scene categories. With object detectors emerging as a result of learning to recognize scenes, our work demonstrates that the same network can perform both scene recognition and object localization in a single forward-pass, without ever having been explicitly taught the notion of objects. Large amounts of available training data and increasing computing power have led to the recent success of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) on a large number of applications. In this paper, we propose an effective semantic pixel labelling using CNN features, hand-crafted features and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). Both CNN and hand-crafted features are applied to dense image patches to produce per-pixel class probabilities. The CRF infers a labelling that smooths regions while respecting the edges present in the imagery. The method is applied to the ISPRS 2D semantic labelling challenge dataset with competitive classification accuracy. Scene recognition is one of the hallmark tasks of computer vision, allowing definition of a context for object recognition. Whereas the tremendous recent progress in object recognition tasks is due to the availability of large datasets like ImageNet and the rise of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for learning high-level features, performance at scene recognition has not attained the same level of success. This may be because current deep features trained from ImageNet are not competitive enough for such tasks. Here, we introduce a new scene-centric database called Places with over 7 million labeled pictures of scenes. We propose new methods to compare the density and diversity of image datasets and show that Places is as dense as other scene datasets and has more diversity. Using CNN, we learn deep features for scene recognition tasks, and establish new state-of-the-art results on several scene-centric datasets. A visualization of the CNN layers' responses allows us to show differences in the internal representations of object-centric and scene-centric networks. Motivated by the success of data-driven convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in object recognition on static images, researchers are working hard towards developing CNN equivalents for learning video features. However, learning video features globally has proven to be quite a challenge due to its high dimensionality, the lack of labelled data and the difficulty in processing large-scale video data. Therefore, we propose to leverage effective techniques from both data-driven and data-independent approaches to improve action recognition system. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we propose a two-stream Stacked Convolutional Independent Subspace Analysis (ConvISA) architecture to show that unsupervised learning methods can significantly boost the performance of traditional local features extracted from data-independent models. Second, we demonstrate that by learning on video volumes detected by Improved Dense Trajectory (IDT), we can seamlessly combine our novel local descriptors with hand-crafted descriptors. Thus we can utilize available feature enhancing techniques developed for hand-crafted descriptors. Finally, similar to multi-class classification framework in CNNs, we propose a training-free re-ranking technique that exploits the relationship among action classes to improve the overall performance. Our experimental results on four benchmark action recognition datasets show significantly improved performance. Remarkable progress has been made in image recognition, primarily due to the availability of large-scale annotated datasets and deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). CNNs enable learning data-driven, highly representative, hierarchical image features from sufficient training data. However, obtaining datasets as comprehensively annotated as ImageNet in the medical imaging domain remains a challenge. There are currently three major techniques that successfully employ CNNs to medical image classification: training the CNN from scratch, using off-the-shelf pre-trained CNN features, and conducting unsupervised CNN pre-training with supervised fine-tuning. Another effective method is transfer learning, i.e., fine-tuning CNN models pre-trained from natural image dataset to medical image tasks. In this paper, we exploit three important, but previously understudied factors of employing deep convolutional neural networks to computer-aided detection problems. We first explore and evaluate different CNN architectures. The studied models contain 5 thousand to 160 million parameters, and vary in numbers of layers. We then evaluate the influence of dataset scale and spatial image context on performance. Finally, we examine when and why transfer learning from pre-trained ImageNet (via fine-tuning) can be useful. We study two specific computer-aided detection (CADe) problems, namely thoraco-abdominal lymph node (LN) detection and interstitial lung disease (ILD) classification. We achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the mediastinal LN detection, and report the first five-fold cross-validation classification results on predicting axial CT slices with ILD categories. Our extensive empirical evaluation, CNN model analysis and valuable insights can be extended to the design of high performance CAD systems for other medical imaging tasks. Existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require a fixed-size (e.g., 224 @math 224) input image. This requirement is “artificial” and may reduce the recognition accuracy for the images or sub-images of an arbitrary size scale. In this work, we equip the networks with another pooling strategy, “spatial pyramid pooling”, to eliminate the above requirement. The new network structure, called SPP-net, can generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size scale. Pyramid pooling is also robust to object deformations. With these advantages, SPP-net should in general improve all CNN-based image classification methods. On the ImageNet 2012 dataset, we demonstrate that SPP-net boosts the accuracy of a variety of CNN architectures despite their different designs. On the Pascal VOC 2007 and Caltech101 datasets, SPP-net achieves state-of-the-art classification results using a single full-image representation and no fine-tuning. The power of SPP-net is also significant in object detection. Using SPP-net, we compute the feature maps from the entire image only once, and then pool features in arbitrary regions (sub-images) to generate fixed-length representations for training the detectors. This method avoids repeatedly computing the convolutional features. In processing test images, our method is 24-102 @math faster than the R-CNN method, while achieving better or comparable accuracy on Pascal VOC 2007. In ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) 2014, our methods rank #2 in object detection and #3 in image classification among all 38 teams. This manuscript also introduces the improvement made for this competition. Abstract Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia is a neurodegenerative brain order that has currently no cure for it. Hence, early diagnosis of such disease using computer-aided systems is a subject of great importance and extensive research amongst researchers. Nowadays, deep learning or particularly convolutional neural network (CNN) is getting more attention due to its state-of-the-art performances in variety of computer vision tasks such as visual object classification, detection and segmentation. Several recent studies, that have used brain MRI scans and deep learning have shown promising results for diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. However, most common issue with deep learning architectures such as CNN is that they require large amount of data for training. In this paper, a mathematical model P F S E C TL based on transfer learning is used in which a CNN architecture, VGG-16 trained on ImageNet dataset is used as a feature extractor for the classification task. Experimentation is performed on data collected from Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. The accuracy of the 3-way classification using the described method is 95.73 for the validation set. Facial action units (AUs) are essential to decode human facial expressions. Researchers have focused on training AU detectors with a variety of features and classifiers. However, several issues remain. These are spatial representation, temporal modeling, and AU correlation. Unlike most studies that tackle these issues separately, we propose a hybrid network architecture to jointly address them. Specifically, spatial representations are extracted by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which, as analyzed in this paper, is able to reduce person-specific biases caused by hand-crafted features (eg, SIFT and Gabor). To model temporal dependencies, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs) are stacked on top of these representations, regardless of the lengths of input videos. The outputs of CNNs and LSTMs are further aggregated into a fusion network to produce per-frame predictions of 12 AUs. Our network naturally addresses the three issues, and leads to superior performance compared to existing methods that consider these issues independently. Extensive experiments were conducted on two large spontaneous datasets, GFT and BP4D, containing more than 400,000 frames coded with 12 AUs. On both datasets, we report significant improvement over a standard multi-label CNN and feature-based state-of-the-art. Finally, we provide visualization of the learned AU models, which, to our best knowledge, reveal how machines see facial AUs for the first time. Robust visual tracking is a challenging computer vision problem, with many real-world applications. Most existing approaches employ hand-crafted appearance features, such as HOG or Color Names. Recently, deep RGB features extracted from convolutional neural networks have been successfully applied for tracking. Despite their success, these features only capture appearance information. On the other hand, motion cues provide discriminative and complementary information that can improve tracking performance. Contrary to visual tracking, deep motion features have been successfully applied for action recognition and video classification tasks. Typically, the motion features are learned by training a CNN on optical flow images extracted from large amounts of labeled videos. This paper presents an investigation of the impact of deep motion features in a tracking-by-detection framework. We further show that hand-crafted, deep RGB, and deep motion features contain complementary information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose fusing appearance information with deep motion features for visual tracking. Comprehensive experiments clearly suggest that our fusion approach with deep motion features outperforms standard methods relying on appearance information alone. Object detection in very high resolution optical remote sensing images is a fundamental problem faced for remote sensing image analysis. Due to the advances of powerful feature representations, machine-learning-based object detection is receiving increasing attention. Although numerous feature representations exist, most of them are handcrafted or shallow-learning-based features. As the object detection task becomes more challenging, their description capability becomes limited or even impoverished. More recently, deep learning algorithms, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have shown their much stronger feature representation power in computer vision. Despite the progress made in nature scene images, it is problematic to directly use the CNN feature for object detection in optical remote sensing images because it is difficult to effectively deal with the problem of object rotation variations. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel and effective approach to learn a rotation-invariant CNN (RICNN) model for advancing the performance of object detection, which is achieved by introducing and learning a new rotation-invariant layer on the basis of the existing CNN architectures. However, different from the training of traditional CNN models that only optimizes the multinomial logistic regression objective, our RICNN model is trained by optimizing a new objective function via imposing a regularization constraint, which explicitly enforces the feature representations of the training samples before and after rotating to be mapped close to each other, hence achieving rotation invariance. To facilitate training, we first train the rotation-invariant layer and then domain-specifically fine-tune the whole RICNN network to further boost the performance. Comprehensive evaluations on a publicly available ten-class object detection data set demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. This paper is concerned of the loop closure detection problem, which is one of the most critical parts for visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems. Most of state-of-the-art methods use hand-crafted features and bag-of-visual-words (BoVW) to tackle this problem. Recent development in deep learning indicates that CNN features significantly outperform hand-crafted features for image representation. This advanced technology has not been fully exploited in robotics, especially in visual SLAM systems. We propose a loop closure detection method based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Images are fed into a pre-trained CNN model to extract features. We pre-process CNN features instead of using them directly as most of the presented approaches did before they are used to detect loops. The workflow of extracting CNN features, processing data, computing similarity score and detecting loops is presented. Finally the performance of proposed method is evaluated on several open datasets by comparing it with Fab-Map using precision-recall metric.