Recent years have witnessed many exciting achievements for object detection using deep learning techniques. Despite achieving significant progresses, most existing detectors are designed to detect objects with relatively low-quality prediction of locations, i.e., often trained with the threshold of Intersection over Union (IoU) set to 0.5 by default, which can yield low-quality or even noisy detections. It remains an open challenge for how to devise and train a high-quality detector that can achieve more precise localization (i.e., IoU @math 0.5) without sacrificing the detection performance. In this paper, we propose a novel single-shot detection framework of Bidirectional Pyramid Networks (BPN) towards high-quality object detection, which consists of two novel components: (i) a Bidirectional Feature Pyramid structure for more effective and robust feature representations; and (ii) a Cascade Anchor Refinement to gradually refine the quality of predesigned anchors for more effective training. Our experiments showed that the proposed BPN achieves the best performances among all the single-stage object detectors on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets, especially for high-quality detections.
Our work is also related to the studies for multi-scale feature fusion, which has been proved to be an effective and important structure for object detection with different scales. ION @cite_19 extracts region features from different layers by ROI Pooling operation; HyperNet @cite_8 directly concatenates features at different layers using deconvolution layers. FPN @cite_21 and DSSD @cite_17 fuses features of different scales with lateral connection in a bottom-up manneer, which effectively improve the detection of small objects. However, the vanilla feature pyramid @cite_21 only considers boosting shallow layer features with deep layer features, but ignores the fact that the instance information in shallow layer features can be helpful to deep semantic layer features. We overcome this limitation by the proposed Bidirectional Feature Pyramid structure.
@cite_19 @cite_21 @cite_17 @cite_8
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Visual recognition requires rich representations that span levels from low to high, scales from small to large, and resolutions from fine to coarse. Even with the depth of features in a convolutional network, a layer in isolation is not enough: compounding and aggregating these representations improves inference of what and where. Architectural efforts are exploring many dimensions for network backbones, designing deeper or wider architectures, but how to best aggregate layers and blocks across a network deserves further attention. Although skip connections have been incorporated to combine layers, these connections have been "shallow" themselves, and only fuse by simple, one-step operations. We augment standard architectures with deeper aggregation to better fuse information across layers. Our deep layer aggregation structures iteratively and hierarchically merge the feature hierarchy to make networks with better accuracy and fewer parameters. Experiments across architectures and tasks show that deep layer aggregation improves recognition and resolution compared to existing branching and merging schemes. Fusing the advantages of multiple acoustic features is important for the robustness of voice activity detection (VAD). Recently, the machine-learning-based VADs have shown a superiority to traditional VADs on multiple feature fusion tasks. However, existing machine-learning-based VADs only utilize shallow models, which cannot explore the underlying manifold of the features. In this paper, we propose to fuse multiple features via a deep model, called deep belief network (DBN). DBN is a powerful hierarchical generative model for feature extraction. It can describe highly variant functions and discover the manifold of the features. We take the multiple serially-concatenated features as the input layer of DBN, and then extract a new feature by transferring these features through multiple nonlinear hidden layers. Finally, we predict the class of the new feature by a linear classifier. We further analyze that even a single-hidden-layer-based belief network is as powerful as the state-of-the-art models in the machine-learning-based VADs. In our empirical comparison, ten common features are used for performance analysis. Extensive experimental results on the AURORA2 corpus show that the DBN-based VAD not only outperforms eleven referenced VADs, but also can meet the real-time detection demand of VAD. The results also show that the DBN-based VAD can fuse the advantages of multiple features effectively. Effective convolutional features play an important role in saliency estimation but how to learn powerful features for saliency is still a challenging task. FCN-based methods directly apply multi-level convolutional features without distinction, which leads to sub-optimal results due to the distraction from redundant details. In this paper, we propose a novel attention guided network which selectively integrates multi-level contextual information in a progressive manner. Attentive features generated by our network can alleviate distraction of background thus achieve better performance. On the other hand, it is observed that most of existing algorithms conduct salient object detection by exploiting side-output features of the backbone feature extraction network. However, shallower layers of backbone network lack the ability to obtain global semantic information, which limits the effective feature learning. To address the problem, we introduce multi-path recurrent feedback to enhance our proposed progressive attention driven framework. Through multi-path recurrent connections, global semantic information from the top convolutional layer is transferred to shallower layers, which intrinsically refines the entire network. Experimental results on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that our algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches. Feature pyramids are a basic component in recognition systems for detecting objects at different scales. But recent deep learning object detectors have avoided pyramid representations, in part because they are compute and memory intensive. In this paper, we exploit the inherent multi-scale, pyramidal hierarchy of deep convolutional networks to construct feature pyramids with marginal extra cost. A top-down architecture with lateral connections is developed for building high-level semantic feature maps at all scales. This architecture, called a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), shows significant improvement as a generic feature extractor in several applications. Using FPN in a basic Faster R-CNN system, our method achieves state-of-the-art single-model results on the COCO detection benchmark without bells and whistles, surpassing all existing single-model entries including those from the COCO 2016 challenge winners. In addition, our method can run at 5 FPS on a GPU and thus is a practical and accurate solution to multi-scale object detection. Code will be made publicly available. Feature pyramids are a basic component in recognition systems for detecting objects at different scales. But pyramid representations have been avoided in recent object detectors that are based on deep convolutional networks, partially because they are slow to compute and memory intensive. In this paper, we exploit the inherent multi-scale, pyramidal hierarchy of deep convolutional networks to construct feature pyramids with marginal extra cost. A top-down architecture with lateral connections is developed for building high-level semantic feature maps at all scales. This architecture, called a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), shows significant improvement as a generic feature extractor in several applications. Using a basic Faster R-CNN system, our method achieves state-of-the-art single-model results on the COCO detection benchmark without bells and whistles, surpassing all existing single-model entries including those from the COCO 2016 challenge winners. In addition, our method can run at 5 FPS on a GPU and thus is a practical and accurate solution to multi-scale object detection. Code will be made publicly available. Semantic image segmentation is a basic street scene understanding task in autonomous driving, where each pixel in a high resolution image is categorized into a set of semantic labels. Unlike other scenarios, objects in autonomous driving scene exhibit very large scale changes, which poses great challenges for high-level feature representation in a sense that multi-scale information must be correctly encoded. To remedy this problem, atrous convolution[14]was introduced to generate features with larger receptive fields without sacrificing spatial resolution. Built upon atrous convolution, Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP)[2] was proposed to concatenate multiple atrous-convolved features using different dilation rates into a final feature representation. Although ASPP is able to generate multi-scale features, we argue the feature resolution in the scale-axis is not dense enough for the autonomous driving scenario. To this end, we propose Densely connected Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (DenseASPP), which connects a set of atrous convolutional layers in a dense way, such that it generates multi-scale features that not only cover a larger scale range, but also cover that scale range densely, without significantly increasing the model size. We evaluate DenseASPP on the street scene benchmark Cityscapes[4] and achieve state-of-the-art performance. This paper proposes a fast video salient object detection model, based on a novel recurrent network architecture, named Pyramid Dilated Bidirectional ConvLSTM (PDB-ConvLSTM). A Pyramid Dilated Convolution (PDC) module is first designed for simultaneously extracting spatial features at multiple scales. These spatial features are then concatenated and fed into an extended Deeper Bidirectional ConvLSTM (DB-ConvLSTM) to learn spatiotemporal information. Forward and backward ConvLSTM units are placed in two layers and connected in a cascaded way, encouraging information flow between the bi-directional streams and leading to deeper feature extraction. We further augment DB-ConvLSTM with a PDC-like structure, by adopting several dilated DB-ConvLSTMs to extract multi-scale spatiotemporal information. Extensive experimental results show that our method outperforms previous video saliency models in a large margin, with a real-time speed of 20 fps on a single GPU. With unsupervised video object segmentation as an example application, the proposed model (with a CRF-based post-process) achieves state-of-the-art results on two popular benchmarks, well demonstrating its superior performance and high applicability. An ensemble of deep classifiers is built for recognizing emotions using multimodal physiological signals.The higher-level abstractions of physiological features of each modality are separately extracted by deep hidden neurons in member stacked-autoencoders.The minimal structure of the deep model is identified according to a structural loss function for local geometrical information preservation.The physiological feature abstractions are merged via an adjacent-graph based fusion network with hierarchical layers. Background and ObjectiveUsing deep-learning methodologies to analyze multimodal physiological signals becomes increasingly attractive for recognizing human emotions. However, the conventional deep emotion classifiers may suffer from the drawback of the lack of the expertise for determining model structure and the oversimplification of combining multimodal feature abstractions. MethodsIn this study, a multiple-fusion-layer based ensemble classifier of stacked autoencoder (MESAE) is proposed for recognizing emotions, in which the deep structure is identified based on a physiological-data-driven approach. Each SAE consists of three hidden layers to filter the unwanted noise in the physiological features and derives the stable feature representations. An additional deep model is used to achieve the SAE ensembles. The physiological features are split into several subsets according to different feature extraction approaches with each subset separately encoded by a SAE. The derived SAE abstractions are combined according to the physiological modality to create six sets of encodings, which are then fed to a three-layer, adjacent-graph-based network for feature fusion. The fused features are used to recognize binary arousal or valence states. ResultsDEAP multimodal database was employed to validate the performance of the MESAE. By comparing with the best existing emotion classifier, the mean of classification rate and F-score improves by 5.26 . ConclusionsThe superiority of the MESAE against the state-of-the-art shallow and deep emotion classifiers has been demonstrated under different sizes of the available physiological instances. Detecting small objects such as vehicles in satellite images is a difficult problem. Many features (such as histogram of oriented gradient, local binary pattern, scale-invariant featuretransform, etc.) have been used to improve the performance of object detection, but mostly in simple environments such as those on roads. proposed that no satisfactory accuracy has been achieved in complex environments such as the City of San Francisco. Deep convolutional neural networks (DNNs) can learn rich features from the training data automatically and has achieved state-of-the-art performance in many image classification databases. Though the DNN has shown robustness to distortion, it only extracts features of the same scale, and hence is insufficient to tolerate large-scale variance of object. In this letter, we present a hybrid DNN (HDNN), by dividing the maps of the last convolutional layer and the max-pooling layer of DNN into multiple blocks of variable receptive field sizes or max-pooling field sizes, to enable the HDNN to extract variable-scale features. Comparative experimental results indicate that our proposed HDNN significantly outperforms the traditional DNN on vehicle detection. RGBD scene recognition has attracted increasingly attention due to the rapid development of depth sensors and their wide application scenarios. While many research has been conducted, most work used hand-crafted features which are difficult to capture high-level semantic structures. Recently, the feature extracted from deep convolutional neural network has produced state-of-the-art results for various computer vision tasks, which inspire researchers to explore incorporating CNN learned features for RGBD scene understanding. On the other hand, most existing work combines rgb and depth features without adequately exploiting the consistency and complementary information between them. Inspired by some recent work on RGBD object recognition using multi-modal feature fusion, we introduce a novel discriminative multi-modal fusion framework for rgbd scene recognition for the first time which simultaneously considers the inter-and intra-modality correlation for all samples and meanwhile regularizing the learned features to be discriminative and compact. The results from the multimodal layer can be back-propagated to the lower CNN layers, hence the parameters of the CNN layers and multimodal layers are updated iteratively until convergence. Experiments on the recently proposed large scale SUN RGB-D datasets show that our method achieved the state-of-the-art without any image segmentation. Compressed sensing MRI is a classic inverse problem in the field of computational imaging, accelerating the MR imaging by measuring less k-space data. The deep neural network models provide the stronger representation ability and faster reconstruction compared with "shallow" optimization-based methods. However, in the existing deep-based CS-MRI models, the high-level semantic supervision information from massive segmentation-labels in MRI dataset is overlooked. In this paper, we proposed a segmentation-aware deep fusion network called SADFN for compressed sensing MRI. The multilayer feature aggregation (MLFA) method is introduced here to fuse all the features from different layers in the segmentation network. Then, the aggregated feature maps containing semantic information are provided to each layer in the reconstruction network with a feature fusion strategy. This guarantees the reconstruction network is aware of the different regions in the image it reconstructs, simplifying the function mapping. We prove the utility of the cross-layer and cross-task information fusion strategy by comparative study. Extensive experiments on brain segmentation benchmark MRBrainS validated that the proposed SADFN model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in compressed sensing MRI. This paper provides a novel approach to guide the low-level visual task using the information from mid- or high-level task. This paper presents how we can achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy in multi-category object detection task while minimizing the computational cost by adapting and combining recent technical innovations. Following the common pipeline of "CNN feature extraction + region proposal + RoI classification", we mainly redesign the feature extraction part, since region proposal part is not computationally expensive and classification part can be efficiently compressed with common techniques like truncated SVD. Our design principle is "less channels with more layers" and adoption of some building blocks including concatenated ReLU, Inception, and HyperNet. The designed network is deep and thin and trained with the help of batch normalization, residual connections, and learning rate scheduling based on plateau detection. We obtained solid results on well-known object detection benchmarks: 83.8 mAP (mean average precision) on VOC2007 and 82.5 mAP on VOC2012 (2nd place), while taking only 750ms image on Intel i7-6700K CPU with a single core and 46ms image on NVIDIA Titan X GPU. Theoretically, our network requires only 12.3 of the computational cost compared to ResNet-101, the winner on VOC2012. Recent studies have shown that the performance of single-image super-resolution methods can be significantly boosted by using deep convolutional neural networks. In this study, we present a novel single-image super-resolution method by introducing dense skip connections in a very deep network. In the proposed network, the feature maps of each layer are propagated into all subsequent layers, providing an effective way to combine the low-level features and high-level features to boost the reconstruction performance. In addition, the dense skip connections in the network enable short paths to be built directly from the output to each layer, alleviating the vanishing-gradient problem of very deep networks. Moreover, deconvolution layers are integrated into the network to learn the upsampling filters and to speedup the reconstruction process. Further, the proposed method substantially reduces the number of parameters, enhancing the computational efficiency. We evaluate the proposed method using images from four benchmark datasets and set a new state of the art. Robust road detection is a key challenge in safe autonomous driving. Recently, with the rapid development of 3D sensors, more and more researchers are trying to fuse information across different sensors to improve the performance of road detection. Although many successful works have been achieved in this field, methods for data fusion under deep learning framework is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a Siamese deep neural network based on FCN-8s to detect road region. Our method uses data collected from a monocular color camera and a Velodyne-64 LiDAR sensor. We project the LiDAR point clouds onto the image plane to generate LiDAR images and feed them into one of the branches of the network. The RGB images are fed into another branch of our proposed network. The feature maps that these two branches extract in multiple scales are fused before each pooling layer, via padding additional fusion layers. Extensive experimental results on public dataset KITTI ROAD demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Abstract In this paper, a vehicle color recognition method using lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed. Firstly, a lightweight CNN network architecture is specifically designed for the recognition task, which contains five layers, i.e. three convolutional layers, a global pooling layer and a fully connected layer. Different from the existing CNN based methods that only use the features output from the final layer for recognition, in this paper, the feature maps of intermediate convolutional layers are all applied for recognition based on the fact that these convolutional features can provide hierarchical representations of the images. Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM) strategy is adopted to divide the feature map, and each SPM sub-region is encoded to generate a feature representation vector. These feature representation vectors of convolutional layers and the output feature vector of the global pooling layer are normalized and cascaded as a whole feature vector, which is finally utilized to train Support Vector Machine classifier to obtain the recognition model. The experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-art methods, the proposed method can obtain more than 0.7 higher recognition accuracy, up to 95.41 , while the dimensionality of the feature vector is only 18 and the memory footprint is only 0.5 . Abstract Automatic detection of multi-class objects in remote sensing images is a fundamental but challenging problem faced for remote sensing image analysis. Traditional methods are based on hand-crafted or shallow-learning-based features with limited representation power. Recently, deep learning algorithms, especially Faster region based convolutional neural networks (FRCN), has shown their much stronger detection power in computer vision field. However, several challenges limit the applications of FRCN in multi-class objects detection from remote sensing images: (1) Objects often appear at very different scales in remote sensing images, and FRCN with a fixed receptive field cannot match the scale variability of different objects; (2) Objects in large-scale remote sensing images are relatively small in size and densely peaked, and FRCN has poor localization performance with small objects; (3) Manual annotation is generally expensive and the available manual annotation of objects for training FRCN are not sufficient in number. To address these problems, this paper proposes a unified and effective method for simultaneously detecting multi-class objects in remote sensing images with large scales variability. Firstly, we redesign the feature extractor by adopting Concatenated ReLU and Inception module, which can increases the variety of receptive field size. Then, the detection is preformed by two sub-networks: a multi-scale object proposal network (MS-OPN) for object-like region generation from several intermediate layers, whose receptive fields match different object scales, and an accurate object detection network (AODN) for object detection based on fused feature maps, which combines several feature maps that enables small and densely packed objects to produce stronger response. For large-scale remote sensing images with limited manual annotations, we use cropped image blocks for training and augment them with re-scalings and rotations. The quantitative comparison results on the challenging NWPU VHR-10 data set, aircraft data set, Aerial-Vehicle data set and SAR-Ship data set show that our method is more accurate than existing algorithms and is effective for multi-modal remote sensing images. The way that information propagates in neural networks is of great importance. In this paper, we propose Path Aggregation Network (PANet) aiming at boosting information flow in proposal-based instance segmentation framework. Specifically, we enhance the entire feature hierarchy with accurate localization signals in lower layers by bottom-up path augmentation, which shortens the information path between lower layers and topmost feature. We present adaptive feature pooling, which links feature grid and all feature levels to make useful information in each feature level propagate directly to following proposal subnetworks. A complementary branch capturing different views for each proposal is created to further improve mask prediction. These improvements are simple to implement, with subtle extra computational overhead. Our PANet reaches the 1st place in the COCO 2017 Challenge Instance Segmentation task and the 2nd place in Object Detection task without large-batch training. It is also state-of-the-art on MVD and Cityscapes. Code is available at this https URL In recent years, we have seen tremendous progress in the field of object detection. Most of the recent improvements have been achieved by targeting deeper feedforward networks. However, many hard object categories such as bottle, remote, etc. require representation of fine details and not just coarse, semantic representations. But most of these fine details are lost in the early convolutional layers. What we need is a way to incorporate finer details from lower layers into the detection architecture. Skip connections have been proposed to combine high-level and low-level features, but we argue that selecting the right features from low-level requires top-down contextual information. Inspired by the human visual pathway, in this paper we propose top-down modulations as a way to incorporate fine details into the detection framework. Our approach supplements the standard bottom-up, feedforward ConvNet with a top-down modulation (TDM) network, connected using lateral connections. These connections are responsible for the modulation of lower layer filters, and the top-down network handles the selection and integration of contextual information and low-level features. The proposed TDM architecture provides a significant boost on the COCO testdev benchmark, achieving 28.6 AP for VGG16, 35.2 AP for ResNet101, and 37.3 for InceptionResNetv2 network, without any bells and whistles (e.g., multi-scale, iterative box refinement, etc.). The way that information propagates in neural networks is of great importance. In this paper, we propose Path Aggregation Network (PANet) aiming at boosting information flow in proposal-based instance segmentation framework. Specifically, we enhance the entire feature hierarchy with accurate localization signals in lower layers by bottom-up path augmentation, which shortens the information path between lower layers and topmost feature. We present adaptive feature pooling, which links feature grid and all feature levels to make useful information in each level propagate directly to following proposal subnetworks. A complementary branch capturing different views for each proposal is created to further improve mask prediction. These improvements are simple to implement, with subtle extra computational overhead. Yet they are useful and make our PANet reach the 1st place in the COCO 2017 Challenge Instance Segmentation task and the 2nd place in Object Detection task without large-batch training. PANet is also state-of-the-art on MVD and Cityscapes. State-of-the-art approaches for the previous emotion recognition in the wild challenges are usually built on prevailing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Although there is clear evidence that CNNs with increased depth or width can usually bring improved predication accuracy, existing top approaches provide supervision only at the output feature layer, resulting in the insufficient training of deep CNN models. In this paper, we present a new learning method named Supervised Scoring Ensemble (SSE) for advancing this challenge with deep CNNs. We first extend the idea of recent deep supervision to deal with emotion recognition problem. Benefiting from adding supervision not only to deep layers but also to intermediate layers and shallow layers, the training of deep CNNs can be well eased. Second, we present a new fusion structure in which class-wise scoring activations at diverse complementary feature layers are concatenated and further used as the inputs for second-level supervision, acting as a deep feature ensemble within a single CNN architecture. We show our proposed learning method brings large accuracy gains over diverse backbone networks consistently. On this year's audio-video based emotion recognition task, the average recognition rate of our best submission is 60.34 , forming a new envelop over all existing records.