We propose a method for the weakly supervised detection of objects in paintings. At training time, only image-level annotations are needed. This, combined with the efficiency of our multiple-instance learning method, enables one to learn new classes on-the-fly from globally annotated databases, avoiding the tedious task of manually marking objects. We show on several databases that dropping the instance-level annotations only yields mild performance losses. We also introduce a new database, IconArt, on which we perform detection experiments on classes that could not be learned on photographs, such as Jesus Child or Saint Sebastian. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first experiments dealing with the automatic (and in our case weakly supervised) detection of iconographic elements in paintings. We believe that such a method is of great benefit for helping art historians to explore large digital databases.
The problem of object detection in paintings, that is, being able to both localise and recognise objects, has been less studied. @cite_51 , it is shown that applying a pre-trained object detector (Faster R-CNN @cite_15 ) and then selecting the localisation with highest confidence can yield correct detections of PASCAL VOC classes. Other works attacked this difficult problem by restricting it to a single class. @cite_55 , it is shown that deformable part model outperforms other approaches, including some CNNs, for the detection of people in cubist artworks. @cite_4 , it is shown that the YOLO network trained on natural images can, to some extend, be used for people detection in cubism. @cite_44 , it is proposed to perform people detection in a wide variety of artworks (through a newly introduced database) by fine-tuning a network in a supervised way. People can be detected with high accuracy even though the database has very large stylistic variations and includes paintings that strongly differs from photographs in the way they represent people.
@cite_4 @cite_55 @cite_44 @cite_15 @cite_51
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Although the human visual system is surprisingly robust to extreme distortion when recognizing objects, most evaluations of computer object detection methods focus only on robustness to natural form deformations such as people’s pose changes. To determine whether algorithms truly mirror the flexibility of human vision, they must be compared against human vision at its limits. For example, in Cubist abstract art, painted objects are distorted by object fragmentation and part-reorganization, sometimes to the point that human vision often fails to recognize them. In this paper, we evaluate existing object detection methods on these abstract renditions of objects, comparing human annotators to four state-of-the-art object detectors on a corpus of Picasso paintings. Our results demonstrate that while human perception significantly outperforms current methods, human perception and part-based models exhibit a similarly graceful degradation in object detection performance as the objects become increasingly abstract and fragmented, corroborating the theory of part-based object representation in the brain. CNNs have massively improved performance in object detection in photographs. However research into object detection in artwork remains limited. We show state-of-the-art performance on a challenging dataset, People-Art, which contains people from photos, cartoons and 41 different artwork movements. We achieve this high performance by fine-tuning a CNN for this task, thus also demonstrating that training CNNs on photos results in overfitting for photos: only the first three or four layers transfer from photos to artwork. Although the CNN’s performance is the highest yet, it remains less than 60 AP, suggesting further work is needed for the cross-depiction problem. State-of-the-art object detection networks depend on region proposal algorithms to hypothesize object locations. Advances like SPPnet and Fast R-CNN have reduced the running time of these detection networks, exposing region proposal computation as a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce a Region Proposal Network (RPN) that shares full-image convolutional features with the detection network, thus enabling nearly cost-free region proposals. An RPN is a fully convolutional network that simultaneously predicts object bounds and objectness scores at each position. The RPN is trained end-to-end to generate high-quality region proposals, which are used by Fast R-CNN for detection. We further merge RPN and Fast R-CNN into a single network by sharing their convolutional features---using the recently popular terminology of neural networks with 'attention' mechanisms, the RPN component tells the unified network where to look. For the very deep VGG-16 model, our detection system has a frame rate of 5fps (including all steps) on a GPU, while achieving state-of-the-art object detection accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007, 2012, and MS COCO datasets with only 300 proposals per image. In ILSVRC and COCO 2015 competitions, Faster R-CNN and RPN are the foundations of the 1st-place winning entries in several tracks. Code has been made publicly available. The objective of this work is to recognize object categories in paintings, such as cars, cows and cathedrals. We achieve this by training classifiers from natural images of the objects. We make the following contributions: (i) we measure the extent of the domain shift problem for image-level classifiers trained on natural images vs paintings, for a variety of CNN architectures; (ii) we demonstrate that classification-by-detection (i.e. learning classifiers for regions rather than the entire image) recognizes (and locates) a wide range of small objects in paintings that are not picked up by image-level classifiers, and combining these two methods improves performance; and (iii) we develop a system that learns a region-level classifier on-the-fly for an object category of a user’s choosing, which is then applied to over 60 million object regions across 210,000 paintings to retrieve localised instances of that category.