Region-based convolutional neural networks (R-CNN) fast_rcnn,faster_rcnn,mask_rcnn have largely dominated object detection. Operators defined on RoIs (Region of Interests) play an important role in R-CNNs such as RoIPooling fast_rcnn and RoIAlign mask_rcnn . They all only utilize information inside RoIs for RoI prediction, even with their recent deformable extensions deformable_cnn . Although surrounding context is well-known for its importance in object detection, it has yet been integrated in R-CNNs in a flexible and effective way. Inspired by the auto-context work auto_context and the multi-class object layout work nms_context , this paper presents a generic context-mining RoI operator (i.e., ) seamlessly integrated in R-CNNs, and the resulting object detection system is termed which is trained end-to-end. The proposed RoICtxMining operator is a simple yet effective two-layer extension of the RoIPooling or RoIAlign operator. Centered at an object-RoI, it creates a @math layout to mine contextual information adaptively in the @math surrounding context regions on-the-fly. Within each of the @math context regions, a context-RoI is mined in term of discriminative power and its RoIPooling RoIAlign features are concatenated with the object-RoI for final prediction. In experiments, it is evaluated using RoIPooling as the backbone and shows competitive results on Pascal VOC, Microsoft COCO, and KITTI datasets (including @math mAP improvements over the R-FCN rfcn method on COCO dataset and the first place on both KITTI pedestrian and cyclist detection as of this submission).
There is general consensus that context can be a rich source of information about an object's identity, location and scale. In fact, the structure of many real-world scenes is governed by strong configurational rules akin to those that apply to a single object. Here we introduce a simple framework for modeling the relationship between context and object properties based on the correlation between the statistics of low-level features across the entire scene and the objects that it contains. The resulting scheme serves as an effective procedure for object priming, context driven focus of attention and automatic scale-selection on real-world scenes. Many state-of-the-art approaches for object recognition reduce the problem to a 0-1 classification task. Such reductions allow one to leverage sophisticated classifiers for learning. These models are typically trained independently for each class using positive and negative examples cropped from images. At test-time, various post-processing heuristics such as non-maxima suppression (NMS) are required to reconcile multiple detections within and between different classes for each image. Though crucial to good performance on benchmarks, this post-processing is usually defined heuristically. We describe an object detection system based on mixtures of multiscale deformable part models. Our system is able to represent highly variable object classes and achieves state-of-the-art results in the PASCAL object detection challenges. While deformable part models have become quite popular, their value had not been demonstrated on difficult benchmarks such as the PASCAL data sets. Our system relies on new methods for discriminative training with partially labeled data. We combine a margin-sensitive approach for data-mining hard negative examples with a formalism we call latent SVM. A latent SVM is a reformulation of MI--SVM in terms of latent variables. A latent SVM is semiconvex, and the training problem becomes convex once latent information is specified for the positive examples. This leads to an iterative training algorithm that alternates between fixing latent values for positive examples and optimizing the latent SVM objective function. Image understanding requires not only individually estimating elements of the visual world but also capturing the interplay among them. In this paper, we provide a framework for placing local object detection in the context of the overall 3D scene by modeling the interdependence of objects, surface orientations, and camera viewpoint. Most object detection methods consider all scales and locations in the image as equally likely. We show that with probabilistic estimates of 3D geometry, both in terms of surfaces and world coordinates, we can put objects into perspective and model the scale and location variance in the image. Our approach reflects the cyclical nature of the problem by allowing probabilistic object hypotheses to refine geometry and vice-versa. Our framework allows painless substitution of almost any object detector and is easily extended to include other aspects of image understanding. Our results confirm the benefits of our integrated approach. The notion of using context information for solving high-level vision and medical image segmentation problems has been increasingly realized in the field. However, how to learn an effective and efficient context model, together with an image appearance model, remains mostly unknown. The current literature using Markov Random Fields (MRFs) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) often involves specific algorithm design in which the modeling and computing stages are studied in isolation. In this paper, we propose a learning algorithm, auto-context. Given a set of training images and their corresponding label maps, we first learn a classifier on local image patches. The discriminative probability (or classification confidence) maps created by the learned classifier are then used as context information, in addition to the original image patches, to train a new classifier. The algorithm then iterates until convergence. Auto-context integrates low-level and context information by fusing a large number of low-level appearance features with context and implicit shape information. The resulting discriminative algorithm is general and easy to implement. Under nearly the same parameter settings in training, we apply the algorithm to three challenging vision applications: foreground background segregation, human body configuration estimation, and scene region labeling. Moreover, context also plays a very important role in medical brain images where the anatomical structures are mostly constrained to relatively fixed positions. With only some slight changes resulting from using 3D instead of 2D features, the auto-context algorithm applied to brain MRI image segmentation is shown to outperform state-of-the-art algorithms specifically designed for this domain. Furthermore, the scope of the proposed algorithm goes beyond image analysis and it has the potential to be used for a wide variety of problems for structured prediction problems. This paper presents a method of learning reconfigurable hierarchical And-Or models to integrate context and occlusion for car detection. The And-Or model represents the regularities of car-to-car context and occlusion patterns at three levels: (i) layouts of spatially-coupled N cars, (ii) single cars with different viewpoint-occlusion configurations, and (iii) a small number of parts. The learning process consists of two stages. We first learn the structure of the And-Or model with three components: (a) mining N-car contextual patterns based on layouts of annotated single car bounding boxes, (b) mining the occlusion configurations based on the overlapping statistics between single cars, and (c) learning visible parts based on car 3D CAD simulation or heuristically mining latent car parts. The And-Or model is organized into a directed and acyclic graph which leads to the Dynamic Programming algorithm in inference. In the second stage, we jointly train the model parameters (for appearance, deformation and bias) using Weak-Label Structural SVM. In experiments, we test our model on four car datasets: the KITTI dataset [11], the street parking dataset [19], the PASCAL VOC2007 car dataset [7], and a self-collected parking lot dataset. We compare with state-of-the-art variants of deformable part-based models and other methods. Our model obtains significant improvement consistently on the four datasets. Person detection is a key problem for many computer vision tasks. While face detection has reached maturity, detecting people under full variation of camera view-points, human poses, lighting conditions and occlusions is still a difficult challenge. In this work we focus on detecting human heads in natural scenes. Starting from the recent R-CNN object detector, we extend it in two ways. First, we leverage person-scene relations and propose a global CNN model trained to predict positions and scales of heads directly from the full image. Second, we explicitly model pairwise relations among the objects via energy-based model where the potentials are computed with a CNN framework. Our full combined model complements R-CNN with contextual cues derived from the scene. To train and test our model, we introduce a large dataset with 369,846 human heads annotated in 224,740 movie frames. We evaluate our method and demonstrate improvements of person head detection compared to several recent baselines on three datasets. We also show improvements of the detection speed provided by our model. 