Convolutional neural networks have been shown to develop internal representations, which correspond closely to semantically meaningful objects and parts, although trained solely on class labels. Class Activation Mapping (CAM) is a recent method that makes it possible to easily highlight the image regions contributing to a network's classification decision. We build upon these two developments to enable a network to re-examine informative image regions, which we term introspection. We propose a weakly-supervised iterative scheme, which shifts its center of attention to increasingly discriminative regions as it progresses, by alternating stages of classification and introspection. We evaluate our method and show its effectiveness over a range of several datasets, where we obtain competitive or state-of-the-art results: on Stanford-40 Actions, we set a new state-of the art of 81.74 . On FGVC-Aircraft and the Stanford Dogs dataset, we show consistent improvements over baselines, some of which include significantly more supervision.
Some recent works attempt to obtain object localization through weak labels, i.e., the net is trained on image-level class labels, but it also learns localization. @cite_3 Localizes image regions pertaining to the target class by masking out sub-images and inspecting change in activations of the network. Oquab al @cite_21 use global max-pooling to obtain points on the target objects. Recently, Zhou al @cite_2 used global average pooling (GAP) to generate a Class-Activation Mapping (CAM), visualizing discriminative image regions and enabling the localization of detected concepts. Our introspection mechanism utilizes their CAMs to iteratively identify discriminative regions and uses them to improve classification without additional supervision.
@cite_21 @cite_3 @cite_2
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Successful methods for visual object recognition typically rely on training datasets containing lots of richly annotated images. Detailed image annotation, e.g. by object bounding boxes, however, is both expensive and often subjective. We describe a weakly supervised convolutional neural network (CNN) for object classification that relies only on image-level labels, yet can learn from cluttered scenes containing multiple objects. We quantify its object classification and object location prediction performance on the Pascal VOC 2012 (20 object classes) and the much larger Microsoft COCO (80 object classes) datasets. We find that the network (i) outputs accurate image-level labels, (ii) predicts approximate locations (but not extents) of objects, and (iii) performs comparably to its fully-supervised counterparts using object bounding box annotation for training. This paper introduces self-taught object localization, a novel approach that leverages deep convolutional networks trained for whole-image recognition to localize objects in images without additional human supervision, i.e., without using any ground-truth bounding boxes for training. The key idea is to analyze the change in the recognition scores when artificially masking out different regions of the image. The masking out of a region that includes the object typically causes a significant drop in recognition score. This idea is embedded into an agglomerative clustering technique that generates self-taught localization hypotheses. Our object localization scheme outperforms existing proposal methods in both precision and recall for small number of subwindow proposals (e.g., on ILSVRC-2012 it produces a relative gain of 23.4 over the state-of-the-art for top-1 hypothesis). Furthermore, our experiments show that the annotations automatically-generated by our method can be used to train object detectors yielding recognition results remarkably close to those obtained by training on manually-annotated bounding boxes. In this work, we revisit the global average pooling layer proposed in [13], and shed light on how it explicitly enables the convolutional neural network to have remarkable localization ability despite being trained on image-level labels. While this technique was previously proposed as a means for regularizing training, we find that it actually builds a generic localizable deep representation that can be applied to a variety of tasks. Despite the apparent simplicity of global average pooling, we are able to achieve 37.1 top-5 error for object localization on ILSVRC 2014, which is remarkably close to the 34.2 top-5 error achieved by a fully supervised CNN approach. We demonstrate that our network is able to localize the discriminative image regions on a variety of tasks despite not being trained for them